On a bright, sunny January day in 2025, officers with the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Office sat down with a young woman at a room in an elementary school in Washington.
The deputy and detective asked her a series of questions about Snapchat messages she had sent to a group of friends that day.
The deputy explained why they were dispatched to the school and why the chat piqued their interest.
“I’m going to be honest with you: This is a serious offense,” the deputy says. “How we got it was the FBI.”
The young woman would be arrested in Tazewell County after she posted a message on Snapchat asking if she should “shoot” a student for trying to turn off her computer while she was composing a lesson plan.
The social media site flagged the message and warned the FBI, which then notified the Sheriff’s Office. As a result, the Illinois State University student was arrested on a disorderly conduct charge.
Police reports and body camera footage from the day in question, obtained by the Journal Star through a FOIA request with the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Office, give insight into what happened, recounting the moments where a student-teacher who sent a sarcastic message to her friends faced real criminal peril.
A message on Snapchat leads to an arrest
According to reports filed by a sheriff’s deputy and a detective, the office had been informed on Jan. 29, 2025, at 1:06 p.m. that the FBI had received a threat via Snapchat involving someone at John A. Hensey School in Washington. According to the FBI, the account that the threat came from belonged to a student-teacher at the school.
The report indicated that she was writing up a lesson plan for a third-grade class when a student pressed the power button on her computer. By turning it off, the student had essentially erased all of her progress.
In a chat with her boyfriend and her two roommates, she advised whether she should “shoot the child or just the whole school?” The Sheriff’s Office was told that the school didn’t know about the threat.
The deputy contacted the school’s assistant principal, Missy Davidson, and told her about the situation. He informed her that he would be coming to the school along with a detective. Upon arrival, the pair sat in an empty classroom to interview the student-teacher about the message.
Much of the body camera footage obtained by the Journal Star recounts this conversation. The pair asked the student-teacher for her phone and the deputy read her Miranda rights before asking if she had been on Snapchat before they had arrived. She said yes, noting that she sends a lot of messages over the course of a day.
The deputy asks her if she’s sent any messages about school and she waffles when answering, saying that a lot of her Snapchat messages revolve around school and her student-teaching role.
She indicated that she hadn’t posted anything, rather just sending messages to the group that included her boyfriend and her roommates. The student-teacher discussed plans with her boyfriend for later that day and also tried to calm a roommate dealing with an anxiety attack.
She noted that she had also taken pictures of students, but had received permission from a faculty adviser to do so. The deputy asked if any students had made her angry in any way, to which she said no. She then explains that a student had turned off her computer while she was writing up a lesson plan, which frustrated her, but didn’t think it was something that angered her in any way.
The deputy then showed her the message flagged by Snapchat. She confirmed that she sent it, but said that it was a joke she intended for the group chat. She said it was “stupid” to send the message and it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.
The student-teacher said she was a “calm” person, with other teachers willing to back her up on that assertion. She gave consent for the Sheriff’s Office to search her phone along with her property, telling the officers that she did not have any firearms.
The phone was taken into evidence, and she asked to get her mother’s number so she could speak with her.
Footage shows investigation at Washington school
Officers soon went to the third-grade classroom to speak with Christina Ellis, the main teacher working with the student-teacher. The deputy asked where she kept her things and they were brought to a corner of the classroom where her water bottle and other belongings sat.
The pair searched behind a curtain for anything that could be dangerous, rummaging through bags, binders and cabinets, but nothing was found that could indicate possible violence. Later, Ellis told officers that there hadn’t been any problems with the students that day and that she had been a quiet, friendly woman who the students took to easily.
Ellis said that the student-teacher was very laid-back, not aggressive, and someone who would let the children come to her in terms of their behavior. She mainly took a backseat to Ellis when it came to the learning process, according to the senior educator.
After their search in Ellis’ classroom, the two officers returned to the room with the student-teacher. Then, the deputy left to get the consent forms for her to sign, allowing them to search her phone and her belongings.
When she is told that she will be arrested, she says, “That’s crazy.”
The deputy says that they are going with what they saw, noting that the current environment of maximum vigilance toward anything that could lead to a school shooting has put them in that situation.
The student-teacher is told that she needs to figure out a way for someone to keep her car for the evening, as she will be held at the Tazewell County Jail until her case could be reviewed by the Tazewell County State’s Attorney’s Office.
The ride to the jail
At 2:38 p.m., the student-teacher, the deputy and the detective depart the school, with the woman placed in handcuffs.
He asks her about Snapchat and how it works, as he isn’t too familiar with the process behind it. After she explains it, the deputy likens it to a Facebook group, which has both public and private material for members of the group.
He says Snapchat was alerted to it before they sent it to the FBI, saying that any time the words “school” and “shooting” were used in the same post, they flag it.
At 3:13 p.m., the deputy and student-teacher arrive at the jail for her to be processed.
The aftermath
The woman was referred into Tazewell County’s deferred prosecution program, which allowed her to have the charges dropped upon completion, according to Assistant State’s Attorney Mike Green.
At the time of her arrest, the school district said the student-teacher would not return to the school to complete her assignment from District 50. She graduated from Illinois State University in May 2025, according to school records.
The student-teacher did not respond to email and phone requests for this story.
Snapchat did not directly comment as to why they flagged the student-teacher’s message, but their community guidelines indicate that they prohibit any content that expresses an intent to cause physical harm to someone. The guidelines say if the threat is “credible and imminent,” they will contact law enforcement.
This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Body cam footage reveals what led to Washington student-teacher’s arrest
Reporting by Zach Roth, Peoria Journal Star / Journal Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
