From staff reports
HUEYTOWN — A 15-year-old Hueytown teen was arrested and sent to juvenile detention after he used the social media application Periscope to say he was recruited by ISIS and would attack the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth airport, according to a WVTM.com report.
The report said the teen showed several weapons on the video he would use to carry out the attack.
After the attack, followers began to alert authorities, and Homeland Security tracked the teen to his home and interviewed him. Authorities located the weapons which turned out to be airsoft guns made to appear real.
“We went to the house, interviewed him, found that the weapons that were displayed were actually called Airsoft guns, which are not real guns but they’re replicas and they’re very realistic in their appearance,” Hueytown Police Chief Chuck Hagler told NBC 13.
The teen was arrested for making a terrorist threat, and his Periscope account has been deleted.
“I think he was probably, quite frankly, just being a stupid teenager. But as I’ve said before we live in a world, you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater and you can’t get on a social media site with what appears to be weapons and make threats in the name of a terrorist organization against a public facility. We just don’t live in that world,” Hagler said.