This is a story about old news.
David Riehm, who was seventeen and a high-school student when all this started, wrote a story about a guy who wakes from a wet dream, proceeds to accidentally sodomize himself with his little brother’s Fischer-Price toy (good detail!) and then gets his head run over by the school bus.
(Does this sound familiar to anyone? It could be a South Park episode.)
His teacher was not happy with his choice of subject matter: “David, I am offended by this piece. If this needs to be your subject matter, you’re going to have to find another teacher. I’m actually a little concerned about your obsessive focus on sex and potty language. Make a change — today!”
He retaliated–not merely by upping the ante on the violence and obscenity, but by changing its focus. He wrote a point/counterpoint essay as a discussion between a creative, misunderstood high-school student named “Tad Warner” and his mean, narrow-minded, puritanical, stupid, jealous teacher, “Mrs. Cuntchesen” (see what he did there?). She commented on that essay, too: “Wow, David. You’ve taken this really personally. Maybe we need to sit down together to talk this through when we have lots of time.”
Apparently, Riehm did have a discussion with his teacher, and she felt that he was willing to modify his language and subject matter a little bit. For a few months afterwards, he wrote stories that she considered appropriate. However, for his final portfolio, David wrote a story called, “Bowling for Cuntchesen,” about a creative, misunderstood high school student who guns down his mean, narrow-minded, puritanical, stupid, jealous teacher. He describes her death in graphic language: “I winced at the shot, but she winced more as the bullet replaced her left eye. In an instant a red mist was produced from the wound, followed by a stead [sic] flow of blood, tissue, and bone fragments. I felt the warm mist speckle onto my face.” Then he describes turning the gun on himself and feeling “at peace.” The end of the story reveals it all to have been just a dream; maybe Riehm thought that would soften the rest of the story. The story contains some misogynist language. He refers to her as “that bitch,” and talks about her stepping “out of line,” and “out of her place.” The story fluctuates between petulance–“Screw her”–and rage.
His teacher felt anxious enough to alert the authorities–not just school authorities, but law enforcement. She explains why in her statement.
Then it gets a little weird:
David was suspended on Jan. 24, 2005. The next night, three men — a Cook County deputy sheriff, a state trooper and a social worker — showed up at Colleen Riehm’s home on the Grand Portage Indian Reservation with a court order to seize her son and commit him to a psychiatric ward 150 miles away in Duluth.
(snip)
David was ordered released from the hospital 72 hours after he had been taken into custody. His mother received $6,000 in medical bills.
And now his family has filed suit.
And now student freedom-of-speech advocates have gotten involved.
On the one hand, it’s horrifying that someone with no history of violence or instability can be involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital on the basis of a creative story. It’s also important to note that this kind of writing is everywhere. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac was my drug of choice when I was his age; South Park is my brother’s. It may well desensitize kids–not to actual violence, but to descriptions of it that other people might interpret as serious threats. It is indeed an “overreach,” as Eric Hudson of the First Amendment Center put it. On the other hand, I think it’s in a different class from other incidents he describes:
Hudson’s report points to cases in Texas where a middle school student was held in juvenile detention for six days in 1999 for a Halloween essay for which he received an “A”; in Kansas, where an honors student was expelled in 2000 for her poem “Who Killed My Dog?” about seeking revenge against someone who killed her dog; and in Louisiana, where a student was punished in 2001 for a two-year-old drawing he created at home that pictured his school under attack.
This was not part of an assignment related to horror writing or Halloween. It was not an old piece of writing. It wasn’t directed at someone outside the school or someone who had done something truly hurtful. Riehm wrote an essay about inflicting violence on his teacher. He turned it in to his teacher after fighting with his teacher. If I were Mrs. Merson, I might be offended by the cheerful obscenity of his earlier essays, and I might speak to him about it. I’d probably be worried if he seemed shocked and outraged by a teacher not wanting to see anal rape in an essay turned in for credit. I’d almost certainly be scared if he subsequently turned in a story about…killing me, basically. Besides that, I’d want to err on the side of caution if a student wrote about shooting himself. And I would probably tell someone.
I think there may be a disconnect between the teacher’s feeling “threatened and violated,” as she puts it, and the understanding on the part of the authorities that they had another Dylan Klebold on their hands. It doesn’t sound like Riehm wants to attack the world; it sounds like he has a very specific grudge against “that bitch.”
Edited to Add:
Okay, this is what I was trying to say in so many words: If I were a teacher faced with a student who felt perfectly justified in calling me a cunt to my face in a story where he describes killing me in the most thinly-veiled of terms, I wouldn’t like Eric Hudson calling me a fascist for reporting that student. I don’t know how involved Merson was in the the actions taken by the authorities–I suspect she had no idea he’d be committed. I don’t think she was at all unreasonable to seek help, or to interpret Riehm’s misogynistic insults as hateful.