Kansas School Shooting Plot Foiled

(CBS/AP)  Kansas law officials say they've foiled a plot to attack a rural high school.

Five teenage boys accused of plotting a shooting rampage at their high school on the anniversary of the Columbine massacre were arrested Thursday after details of the alleged scheme appeared on the Web site MySpace.com.

Sheriff's deputies found guns, ammunition, knives and coded messages in the bedroom of one suspect, Sheriff Steve Norman said. Authorities also found documents about firearms in two suspects' school lockers.

"What the resounding theme is: They were actually going to do this," Norman said.

Norman said he would ask prosecutors to bring charges of conspiracy to commit murder against the teens, ages 16 to 18. He said the state attorney general would handle the prosecution.

Deputies' interviews with the suspects indicated they planned to wear black trench coats and disable the school's camera system before starting the attack between noon and 1 p.m. Thursday, Norman said. The suspects apparently had been plotting since the beginning of the school year.

Officials at Riverton High School began investigating on Tuesday after learning that a threatening message had been posted on MySpace.com, he said.

The message discussed the significance of April 20, which is Adolf Hitler's birthday and the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School attack in Colorado, in which two students killed 13 people and committed suicide, the sheriff said.

The anniversary of the Columbine massacre passed quietly at the site of the killings six years ago. No public events were scheduled, nor were any classes at Columbine High School held, on this 7th anniversary of the nation's deadliest school shooting.

The event commemorating this anniversary will next weekend's groundbreaking for a $1.5 million memorial site in the park next to Columbine, reports CBS News correspondent Lee Frank (audio).

"The message, it was brief, but it stated that there was going to be a shooting at the Riverton school and that people should wear bulletproof vests and flak jackets," Norman said.

School officials identified the student who posted the message and talked to several of his friends, Norman said.

But Riverton school district Superintendent David Walters said the significance of the threat didn't become clear until Wednesday night, after a woman in North Carolina who had chatted with one of the suspects on Myspace.com received a list of about a dozen potential victims, including at least one staff member. She notified authorities in her state, who contacted the sheriff's department, Norman said.

Norman said that the potential victims were popular students and that the suspects may have been bullied.

"I think there was probably some bullying, name calling, chastising," he said.

About 900 students in all grades go to school on the campus.

Riverton is an unincorporated area of about 600 people along what once was the famed Route 66 in southeast Kansas, near the Oklahoma and Missouri borders.