Recently a professor at Northwest Missouri State University, Matthew Rouch, was arrested for a threatening Facebook post. The threat was fake, but it turned out there were other problems, like a lot of marijuana.
Rouch recently posted on Facebook that “by October, I’ll be wanting to get up to the top of the bell tower with a high powered rifle — with a good scope, and probably a gatling gun as well.”
This seems to be astoundingly more threatening than the “threat” issued last month by a student at St. Louis Community College at Meramec when she posted on Twitter that she “wanted to kill someone” due to her frustrations with the financial aid office at her school. But On Friday county officials said Rouch would not be not be charged with making a terrorist threat.
But they still raided his house to look for weapons. They didn’t seem to find anything like high powered rifle or a gatling gun or evidence of plans to kill anyone from any bell towers. They did, however, find a lot of pot: “Deputies said they discovered marijuana plants growing beneath heated lights, multiple baggies of pot and a few bongs, all sitting in plain sight.”
They won’t say how much pot they found but they did say it seemed like an awful lot for personal use and suggests “an elaborate growing operation.”
And that’s why you shouldn’t say controversial things on Facebook…
Matthew Rouch, incidentally, taught communications at Northwest Missouri State, so you’d think he’d know the importance of not writing dumb things on the Internet.
