Parents were not informed of student’s racist video, threats

COLUMBIA, S.C. >> A Catholic school in South Carolina waited more than two weeks to tell parents a student was expelled and arrested after making racist videos and threatening to shoot black people.

The videos of the white, 16-year-old male casually firing a gun and making racist comments revived painful memories of the fatal shooting of nine black worshippers in a Charleston church in 2015.

Two of the videos made by the Cardinal Newman School student show him using at least two different guns to fire more than two dozen shots into a box that he says represents all black men, according to a Richland County Sheriff’s Department report.

He uses a racial slur several times in the videos and says black people “are stinky and they just suck.” “They are bad people.”

The videos were made May 11 and sent around in a group text, according to the police report, which did not indicate how many people received them. School officials got wind of the videos on July 13, called police and told the student’s parents they planned to expel him on the next weekday, July 15, according to a letter from Cardinal Newman Principal Robert Loia. The Catholic diocese of Columbia, which oversees the school, gave a copy of the letter to The Associated Press.

The student was arrested on July 17 after a third video surfaced in which he threatened to shoot people at the school, according to the sheriff’s department report. He has been charged as a juvenile with making student threats. His name has not been released because he is a minor.

School officials didn’t tell parents about the student until The State published a story about him, on July 30.