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(or, The Diary of a Confessed Caffeine Abuser)
Do Your Homework, Go To Jail
Dallas, Texas is no place to practice creative writing
By David "Spam Me and Die" Fiedler
Yesterday Christopher Beamon got out of jail.
No, he wasn't a bank robber, a burglar, or even a criminal in the sense most of us have of that word. He's a 13-year-old boy in the seventh grade who was just doing his homework.
According to the Dallas Morning News, he was incarcerated last Thursday after writing--as requested by his teacher--a scary Halloween story. The teacher thought enough of the story to give Chris a perfect 100 grade, plus extra credit for reading it aloud in class. However, the content and subject matter were enough to encourage "concerned" school administrators to take him directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
So without further ado, here's the story in all its gruesome detail:
My flashlight went out and I heard someone right behind me and I turned in a very slowly scared way and boom the lights came on and the door bell rang. I walked very slowly and creepy and turned the knob ding dong the door bell went again. I said just a minute and I will be right there and I looked through the little hole in the door and Robin said Boo. I told him to come in and have a seat and we both wated and wated for Ismael because he was supposed to bring the (ounce) so we could get high but half an hour later still no Ismael so I got the idea of freeon and we grabbed a bag and a knife and ran out back to the airconditionar. We througth the bag over the nostle and covered it tightly and used the knife to press the volv. We started to hear something after we got high so we ditched everything we quickly run to the door to see who it was and there wasn't anybody there then we heard someone at the back door to see who it was I thought it was a crook so I busted out with a 12 guage and Ismael busted out with 9 mm and we step off the porch and this bloody body droped down in front of us and scared us half to death and about 20 kids started cracking up and pissed me off so I shot Matt, Jake, and Ben started laughing so hard that I acssedently shot Mrs. Henry. Ismael saw somebody steeling antifreeze so Ismael shot over ther near the airconditonar and hit somebody (indecipherable word) also scattered out and went home and my mom drove up and everything was back to normal but they didn't have any heads.
Well, the scariest part of this to me (apart from the fact that an essay with such poor grammar and spelling got a perfect grade, of course) is the casual and matter-of-fact references to drugs and violence by a 13-year-old boy. But I don't see any threats of any kind.
The thing is, he was told to write a scary story, and that's what he did. Does that make him a criminal? Even the fact that he's writing about drugs and guns--which, last time I looked, are legitimate subjects for writing about, given that they're the basis for approximately 92% of the books, music, movies and TV shows being produced at any given time--is still legal in this country. We have a little thing called freedom of the press here.
Besides, writing about a subject doesn't mean you're planning to participate in what you're writing about. One of the writers elsewhere on internet.com wrote a book that happens to be sitting on my bookshelf at home, which was a fictional book about a terrorist. Should he be arrested for planning terrorist acts? After all, he's an adult, and is therefore theoretically in the position of being able to become a terrorist (although I'm not quite sure where you go to learn that stuff).
But assuming that Chris Beamon's mother supervises him even halfway adequately, he's unlikely to be actually taking drugs or shooting anyone or becoming a terrorist himself. It seems that he's actually been arrested for having a good imagination.
One wonders what Stephen King wrote at the age of 13, and whether he should be arrested even now.
Now, I happen to have a 10-year-old son in fifth grade, who was also given a similar assignment last week. I don't know what kind of teachers they have in Dallas (we already know what their school administrators are like, eh?), but if my Scott ever spelled this badly in a written assignment (which he doesn't), he wouldn't have gotten anywhere near a 100 grade, and I would have made sure he spent the next afternoon with a good dictionary.
-- D. Fiedler
David Fiedler is Editor-in-Chief of WebDeveloper.com, and his opinions are definitely his own.
Last modified: Wed Nov 3 15:38:30 EST 1999
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