Cherry Hill student held after 'hit list'

A Cherry Hill middle school student was taken into custody Wednesday after he wrote a "hit list of all his friends" as a prank, authorities said.

"He thought by making this list, he and his friends would get out of school for the rest of the day," Cherry Hill Lt. William Kushina said of the Rosa International Middle School student. "It's a prank, it's not a true hit list."

The 13-year-old student told administrators he found the note on a bathroom stall, but administrators and police later discovered that he had authored the note, according to Dan Keashen, spokesman for Mayor Bernie Platt.

Kushina said the note was handwritten.

Authorities did not release the name of the student because he is a juvenile. He has been charged with juvenile delinquency, Kushina said.

Keashen said the teenager was released to his parents.

If the student were an adult, Kushina said, the equivalent charges would be making terroristic threats and creating a false public alarm.

In a letter to parents, principal Edward Canzanese said that "a note of a threatening nature" included names of individuals, but he did not elaborate.

"No one was ever in danger" during the police investigation of the message, which was brought to the school's attention by students, Canzanese wrote.

A secretary at the school district said officials would not comment further.

It was unclear how many names were on the prank hit list.

"He's going to find out the hard way that a prank like this is going to land him in a lot of trouble," Kushina said. "Since the days of Columbine, anybody that makes any type of comment like that, it has to be taken at face value."

He said such threats are dealt with "immediately, swiftly, and harshly."