Sixty minutes. That’s how long it took for a private Snapchat message to travel from Kristen Volpe’s phone to the FBI to the deputies standing in her elementary school hallway. On January 29, 2025, the 22-year-old student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois, vented to her boyfriend and two roommates — three people total — after a student closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan. She referenced shooting the student or the school. She meant it as a frustrated joke. Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor.
No student reported her. No parent. No coworker. The flag was entirely automated. Snapchat’s policy permits voluntary emergency disclosures to law enforcement — no warrant required — when the platform determines imminent harm exists. The algorithm makes that initial call. Think of it like your Ring doorbell deciding to call 911 on its own, except the doorbell is reading your text messages.
You can joke all you want, but some jokes have consequences because the outcome of it not being a joke is very bad.
Would you honestly be cool with Snapchat if a school shooting actually happened and they just sat on the information?
I guarantee everyone downvoting my TLC would be calling for the murder of the CEO.
Any threat of shooting children should be taken seriously until it can be determined the threat wasn’t legitimate. This time it was a joke, but next time might not be.
But you do understand that they did not “have the information” in this case, don’t you?
They created a false suspicion.
No, they didn’t. They reported someone saying they were going to shoot school children. It’s up to the police to gather the information at that point. And they acted quickly to do so.
If you overhear someone say, “I’m going to go home and shoot up my kid so I have someone to get high with,” you shouldn’t assume it’s a joke and report it. (This happens a lot, btw).