The teenager, who was not identified, is believed to have published a post on the web forum 4chan that threatened an “ethnic cleansing” at Charlottesville High School, authorities said.
The post set off a rapid investigation and prompted the Charlottesville public school district, which serves about 4,300 students from kindergarten to high school, to shut down all its campuses Thursday and Friday.
By midday Friday, the Charlottesville Police Department had announced that a suspect was in custody and had been charged with threatening to commit serious bodily harm on a school property, as well as harassment.
The teenager, who lives in the area, is not a student at Charlottesville High School, Chief RaShall M. Brackney of the Charlottesville Police Department said at a news conference Friday afternoon.
Brackney condemned the “vile, racially charged” threat against students in Charlottesville, which is still dealing with the aftermath of a deadly white supremacist rally nearly two years ago. The tensions that broke out in August 2017 thrust the city, often considered a bastion of Southern progressivism, into a national conversation about Confederate statues, deep-seated racism and economic disparities.
“We want the community and the world to know that hate is not welcomed in Charlottesville, violence is not welcomed in Charlottesville, intolerance is not welcomed in Charlottesville,” Brackney said Friday.
Referencing language President Donald Trump used when he blamed “both sides” for violence at the rally, the police chief added: “In Charlottesville and around the globe, we stand firmly in stating: there are not very fine people on both sides of this issue.”
Since hordes of people with guns, swastikas and Confederate flags descended on the city, in a rally that featured beatings, brawls and a car that plowed into a crowd of anti-racist counterprotesters, killing one of them, the people of Charlottesville have seen a drastic overhaul of the city’s leadership and engaged in conversations about what kind of city Charlottesville is going to be.
The city is grappling with deep-seated inequity, including in its school system. Charlottesville City Schools, where students are about 40 percent white, 30 percent black and 12 percent Hispanic, has one of the widest educational disparity gaps in the United States.
Christine Esposito, an elementary schoolteacher in the district, said in an interview Friday that the online threat and the upheaval that followed had exacerbated wounds “that are already present and we are already trying to deal with.”
She added, “The person who made the threat clearly understood what is going on in Charlottesville and what it feels like to live in Charlottesville.”
Images posted on social media appeared to show a copy of the post on 4chan, an anonymous web forum where offensive views proliferate. A user who claimed to be affiliated with Charlottesville High School promised an “ethnic cleansing in my school” and, using slurs, threatened to kill African-American and Hispanic people.
Authorities first learned about the threat Wednesday afternoon and worked to determine its credibility before making an arrest around 6 a.m. Friday.
When asked about the race of the suspect, the chief did not answer directly, saying only that the teenager “identifies as Portuguese.” Authorities have declined to name him because he is a minor.
While white supremacist hatred long predates sites like 4chan or Reddit, online platforms can create and reinforce extremist beliefs. And extremist behavior online has preceded real-life violence in recent instances.
The suspect in a mass shooting that killed 50 people at mosques in New Zealand last week seemed to have planned the attack as an online performance. He teased his act on Twitter, announced it on the online message board 8chan and appeared to have posted a 74-page manifesto online before streaming the massacre on Facebook.
And last year, hours before a gunman barged into a Pittsburgh synagogue and killed 11 people, authorities say he posted a signoff on Gab, a social network that bills itself as a “free speech” alternative to Facebook and Twitter, and that has become a haven for white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other extremists.
In another instance, the suspect accused of sending explosive devices to prominent Democrats last year appeared to have been radicalized online.
“Even though this threat has been resolved, the fear and anxiety that it provoked is real,” Rosa Atkins, superintendent of Charlottesville City Schools, said at the news conference Friday.
She said the district planned to reopen schools by Monday morning.
In an email to families, Atkins urged strength and solidarity in the face of hate.
“We will NOT let this divide us, either as a school or as a city or even as a region,” she wrote.
Officials said the district had worked with community groups over the past two days to send pizza and fruit to low-income students who typically got free meals at school.
Esposito said she spent part of her day Friday visiting students in their neighborhoods, taking them snacks and navigating complex conversations about what had happened.
“Trying to figure out how to explain to an 8-year-old why they are at home on a Friday,” she said, “is really hard.”
In the aftermath of the white supremacist rally, she said, her fourth-grade students worked on a yearlong project examining the history of Charlottesville, “as a way of processing what happened.”
And now this.
“At this point, it’s almost cumulative,” Esposito said. “You think you’re over the worst part and then something else happens. And you realize you’re not over the worst part — and maybe you’ll never be.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.