Mooresville High School Student Arrested after Planning Shooting
Source: WISH-TV / WISH-TV
MOORESVILLE, Ind. (WISH) — An 18-year-old student with a fascination for the perpetrator of a Valentine’s Day high school shooting in 2018 in Florida was arrested Thursday after planning a mass shooting for Friday at Mooresville High School, police say.
Trinity J. Shockley, was being held in the Morgan County jail in Martinsville without bond. She was charged Thursday in Morgan Superior Court 1 with the highest-level felony count of conspiracy to commit murder, and two low-level felony counts of intimidation with a threat to commit terrorism, according to online court records.
Online court records say the FBI on Tuesday alerted the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office about a tip regarding a threat, and the sheriff’s office shared that information with Mooresville Metropolitan Police Department.
Detective Matthew McDaniel of the Mooresville police wrote in the probable cause document filed in court that the FBI tipster said a friend was planning a shooting on Feb. 14: “Tipster stated that the offender stated that he will kill his best friend (redacted) first.”
The detective interviewed Shockley on Wednesday. He learned she’d been planning the shooting for at least a year.
The detective wrote that Shockley was an admirer of Nikolas Cruz. He was the mass shooter in the Feb. 14, 2018, Parkland high school shooting in Florida.
The detective wrote in court documents, “Trinity’s motivation for making the plan is Cruz. She wanted to prove that she is his number one fan. Trinity has an emotional attachment to Cruz. Her message behind the plan is that she does not like people who think they are better than everyone else and people should value their everyday life. You never know and you could die at any minute. Trinity could see herself in court after executing her plan, but she did not like it. When she saw all the police officers, it hit her that she did not want this. She does not want to be escorted to a cop car after doing that. Trinity did not want to go to court and listen to all the stuff.”
The tipster also told the FBI that the friend had just ordered a bulletproof vest and had access to an AR-15. The Colt-style semi-automatic rifle is often used for hunting, target shooting, and home defense.
Mooresville School Police on Wednesday executed search warrants of Shockley’s home and took her into custody, according to a news release from Mooresville Police Chief Kerry A. Buckner.
Investigators found an AR-15 rifle in the closet of Shockley’s father.
In the bedroom of her home, investigators found a collage of mass murderers, including Cruz. The collage also had images of Dylann Roof and Randy Stair.
Roof, a white supremacist and neo-Nazi, murdered nine people on June 17, 2015, in a South Carolina church.
Stair, the so-called “YouTube Killer” who used the moniker Andrew Blaze on the video social media website, killed three co-workers on June, 8, 2017, before committing suicide at a supermarket in Pennsylvania.
A high school senior months from graduation, Shockley told the detective that she keeps a “close circle of friends” at the high school. She had just started a job at a sandwich shop. She hopes to attend Ivy Tech Community College and study criminology.
The detective said Shockley expressed guilt about Simpson’s suicide, that it was her fault he took his life.
Detectives also learned that Shockley had sought mental health resources from the school district, but Shockley’s father denied that request. A school official told investigators that Shockley’s father “did not believe in mental health treatment” and did not take his daughter’s requests for help seriously.
