Police called after New York teenager posts Johnny Cash lyrics to Facebook

by Mark Teo

April 17, 2015

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If there’s a certain amount of hysteria around song lyrics and social media, it’s not without precedent: In Canada alone, Justin Bourque, the shooter who kept Moncton under lockdown last summer, posted Megadeth lyrics on Facebook before arming himself with his guns. Kimveer Gill, the 2006 shooter who terrorized Montreal’s Dawson College, also quoted Megadeth lyrics before going on his rampage. Matthew de Grood, the stabber accused of the Calgary mass murder in 2014, posted lyrics to “The World Needs a Hero” on Facebook. And—we could go on. But we won’t.

Here’s the point: While it’s evident that music (even violent music) and murder aren’t correlated, there’s a certain amount of suspicion that arises whenever questionable lyrics are posted to social media. And that’s what got a 15-year-old Johnny Cash fan investigated by police.

The teenager, who was a student at the Lower East Side’s New Explorations Into Science school, posted a simple message to Instagram: It was a quote from Cash’s 2002 song, “The Man Comes Around,” along with the school’s crest and a date.

Here’s a screenshot of his post, taken via the Daily News.

To our eyes, those lyrics are hardly ominous. But the school clearly viewed the Cash quote as a threat: In an email circulated to the parents of high-school students, school administrators assured parents that their children weren’t in danger.

Of course, some didn’t agree—and according to the Daily News, an email thread began circulating among parents, with several contacting the police. After investigating the matter, the police determined that the Johnny Cash fan posed no threat.

“We spoke with the parents of the student who wrote the message and were reassured that the student’s message was not meant to be a threat to anyone,” the school’s principal, Olga Livanis, wrote in an email to the school.

That’s not how we took it, either. Listen to “The Man Comes Around” below.

Tags: Music, News, Johnny Cash

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