A 22-year-old San Antonio man is being held on $250,000 bond after investigators say he laid out a plan to shoot children at a nearby elementary school in a conversation with an AI chatbot, according to an arrest affidavit obtained by the San Antonio Express-News.
Nathaniel Michael Carrasco was using an Anthropic chatbot on Aug. 11 when he began describing plans to get a firearm and attack Serna Elementary School, near his home, the affidavit says. "I'm getting a gun as soon as I can, and when Serna Elementary starts, I'm just gonna walk in there and start shooting up kids," he wrote in one message, according to the Express-News.
In another: "Search up dead school kids bleeding. Will do everything in my power to help create that reality. There shall be no escape, no matter what. ... You don't get to stop this shooting. I hope I can get a gun so that way I can just shoot up a (expletive) school already."
The FBI's National Threat Operations Section, the bureau's central intake for tips and threat reports, discovered the chat and alerted local law enforcement on Aug. 28, 17 days after the messages were sent. Federal and local investigators then obtained records from phone and internet providers and from Google, which matched the IP address, phone number, and home address behind the messages to Carrasco. The reporting does not say how the FBI first came across the conversation, or whether the chatbot's operator reported it.
Carrasco was charged with making a terroristic threat causing public fear of serious bodily injury, a third-degree felony under Texas law, and booked into the Bexar County Jail.
The school
Serna Elementary is one of the smaller schools in North East Independent School District. It enrolls about 312 students in prekindergarten through fifth grade, according to federal enrollment data, with a student body that is about 53% Hispanic and a student-teacher ratio near 9 to 1.
Sources
NJ.com: An AI chatbot conversation revealed a Texas man's terrifying plan to attack an elementary school
Arrest affidavit as reported by the San Antonio Express-News.
Enrollment and staffing figures from allk12's analysis of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data.
