Friday, 8th of December, 2000
Oh wow:
Honor Roll Student Faces Charges After School Threat
A 17-year old honors student is charged with causing quite a scare at a metro east high school. Steve Geroff is charged with attempted arson and disorderly conduct, both felonies. Education Reporter Sharon Stevens was the first to have this story at noon.
Steve Geroff has been suspended from Granite City High School, pending an expulsion hearing. He is a senior. Officials call what happened Monday in a chemistry lab, bizarre and potentially very dangerous. They say it was a classic case of payback.
Granite City Schools superintendent Steve Balen says the feud between Steve Gerhoff and another male student dates back to elementary school. Gerhoff apparently wanted to get even for something that happened last week. According to Balen, "He went in and changed a screen saver message to make it appear that this other student was going to blow up the laboratory and then the second part of the plan consisted of actually going in and attempting to blow up the laboratory."
Balen says Gerhoff was the last student to leave the chemistry lab. School officials say that the suspect turned on this gas burner and four others, full blast. Now normally when experiments are going on, the ventilator would be turned on. But this time it was turned off.
The smell began to fill the room. Another student discovered the gas jets were on, immediately notified a teacher and the room was ventilated. The school has 32 cameras. One of them caught Gerhoff on tape in this hallway shortly after the incident occurred.
Classmates described Gerhoff as a nice guy. Students and parents were shocked. Renee Walker has two children at the school. "I'm stunned. Why isn't that room locked when the students aren't in there and the teacher's not there?
Thursday, 7th of December, 2000
Wow, Calfornia is having power shortage problems... in the middle of winter! Apparantly, 1/3 of their power plants are shut because of the extra maintenence they need after very heavy usage in the summer. Also, some of them are down because they've simply met their pollution quotas for the year. That's just absurd. Many proposals have been presented to build new power plants there, but citizens, being environmentalist, were against it. What a nice way to drive commerce and industry out of your state.
Wednessday, 6th of December, 2000
Tuesday, 5th of December, 2000
Monday, 4th of December, 2000
Sunday, 3rd of December, 2000