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‘Racist’ Text Messages Sparked Outrage at Mass. Middle School — Now Police Say They've Uncovered the Truth

‘Racist’ Text Messages Sparked Outrage at Mass. Middle School — Now Police Say They've Uncovered the Truth

"... concerning and hurtful to the entire community ..."

After a pair of racially charged incidents this year — racist and anti-Semitic graffiti found in a school bathroom and an 84-year-old Trump critic getting a copy of a KKK badge in the mail — folks in Arlington, Massachusetts, had just about enough.

Then Arlington Public Schools announced late last month that a middle school student allegedly sent text messages containing multiple racial epithets to another student.

The Guardian reports that a Top Secret NSA brief shows the agency was tracking and storing data from 200 million text messages each day. (Credit: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images)  Image source: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

“The allegation of racist texts being sent from one middle school student to another was concerning and hurtful to the entire community—" Superintendent Kathleen Bodie said in a Wednesday press release, according to the Arlington Patch.

The rest of Bodie's sentence disclosed what police had discovered: "—and I am disappointed that a student would falsify a report of this nature."

It was alleged the texts were written by a sixth-grade girl and targeted a boy of Indian descent with derogatory references to the boy's heritage, the Boston Globe reported. But the texts weren't sent to the targeted boy; they were allegedly received first by a friend of his, and this friend was supposed to deliver the texts to him, the paper said. 

After parents got involved and police were called, it turns out the student who claimed to have received the racist texts "created the narrative and fabricated the story," Bodie explained.

However, it isn't clear in the police notice exactly how the culprit carried it all out, if a sixth-grade girl is involved in any way or if the targeted student actually saw the texts. TheBlaze on Thursday contacted Arlington police for answers, but officials with knowledge of the case weren't available.

Police told the Patch that while no charges have been filed, they're working with the school to determine necessary discipline.

This story has been updated.

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Dave Urbanski

Dave Urbanski

Sr. Editor, News

Dave Urbanski is a senior editor for Blaze News and has been writing for Blaze News since 2013. He has also been a newspaper reporter, a magazine editor, and a book editor. He resides in New Jersey. You can reach him at durbanski@blazemedia.com.
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