Teenage Terrorist Thwarted By One Brave Lady’s ‘Gut Feeling’
At the risk of sounding superstitious, I’ll admit that I am the type of person who strongly believes in following my gut instinct. I’m generally an easygoing person, but the few times I’ve had a bad feeling and ignored it, I’ve almost always regretted it. Sometimes your subconscious will pick up on something long before your Candy Crush-addled consciousness will…which is exactly what happened to Chelsie Shellhas when she called 911 after witnessing a lanky teenaged boy slip into a storage locker. Her reasoning? It just looked wrong. And boy was she right.
Inside the storage locker, Wacesa, Minnesota police found bomb-making materials such as ball-bearings, pyrotechnic chemicals, gunpowder and a pressure cooker, as well as guns. Thanks to Shellhas’ quick thinking and spot-on intuition cops were able to nab 17-year-old John David LaDue, a Columbine-obsessed high school kid who was planning an attack on a local school.
According to CNN LaDue has been extremely forthcoming with information. Not only was he going to try to blow up a school to fulfill his pyromaniac fantasies, but he also planned to murder both his parents and even his sister, who was very close to LaDue, according to family friend and music tutor Ryan Lano.
Between his confession and the overwhelming evidence police found thanks to Shellhas, LaDue is being charged with four counts of attempted murder, six counts of possessing explosives as well as other, related property damage charges.
The details of this story are macabre and chilling, but what freaks me out the most is how easily it could have been overlooked. The only thing that stood between the world and Columbine-like event in Wacesa was one woman’s keen intuition (and the fact that the authorities actually looked into it instead of laughing and hanging up). So the next time you see something unsettling and you’re tempted to let it go because you think you’re imagining things and you don’t want to look crazy, maybe you should think again.
(Photo: LockersUSA)
