Suspicious Dresser Provokes Panic! at Florida High School

High-school officials are prone
to overreacting to “supicious” activity on school grounds.
Instances of this are not particularly newsworthy or novel, but
some cases have better absurdist potential than others, and this is
an especialy absurd one. It seems that utter! chaos! broke loose at
a Miami-area high school after officials found a suspicious piece
of hatefully-painted furniture. 

According to CBSMiami, a wooden
dresser was found in the middle of the Flanagan High School
courtyard Wednesday morning as students were arriving. The dresser
had been painted with a swastika, curse words, an anti-African
American slur, and the messages “open me” and “surprise
inside”.

Police were called in to investigate, understandably (I sure as
heck wouldn’t want to open a mysterious Nazi dresser labeled
‘surprise inside’), and students were ushered out of the area. The
scene that followed, as described by CBS:

School officials immediately started moving students out of the
area of the building to the bleachers on the ball fields and sent
out robocalls to all the parents. Arriving students were sent home.
Students who were not picked up or walked home, were sent to the
nearby Walter C. Young Middle School to wait for rides home.

“Teachers started yelling at me to leave school,” said Karina
Zodrafakis, “And I heard what happened and I was scared.”

Some students ran for it.

“It was rough. A lot of police, a lot of people jumping fences,”
said student Sebastian Espinosa.

Students were literally running and jumping fences in fear of a
dresser. A nice example of how school officials exasperate
situations with worst-case scenario attitudes and antics. 

A bomb-squad robot eventually poked the dresser until it fell
over, finding inside a cinder block, several bricks, and some
paper. Police said surveillance cameras show three individuals in
hoodies dragging in the dresser in in a cart around 3 a.m. The
Anti-Defamation League released a statement calling for “swift
collaboration…to investigate this potential hate
crime.”