Tag: Tobin Kerns

Toby Kerns released on $20,000 bail:

Toby Kerns has been released on $20,000 bail. Prosecutors argued the bail should be set at $1 million cash due to the severity of the charges, but luckily, Juvenile Court Judge Louis Coffin did not agree.

The article also states that Kern’s attorney William McElligott believes the Marshfield Police are withholding evidence that the defense is entitled to see. Considering the other suspect is the son of a cop, this comes off as very suspicious.

What doesn’t look good is that the Assistant District Attorney John McLaughlin said the maps found in Toby’s home were analyzed by the state crime lab, and it was determined they were in Toby’s handwriting. However, William McElligott said the tests on the maps and other written material, including the hit list, have been inconclusive.

For now, Toby will not be returning to school and will be more or less homeschooled. I guess that would be in Toby’s best interest as well. Could you imagine how much he would be harassed in school, even if his involvement in the plot was little to none? Unfortunately, that’s the nature of high school.

Enjoy your pancakes, Toby.

The Lost Boys:

This is a great article from Boston Magazine that goes over the entire Marshfield saga in great detail. When you get a chance, read the entire article to get a look into the mind of Joseph Nee.

I found it interesting that the night Joe Nee showed up at the Kerns’ house, this is what happened…

Two days after Joe Nee showed up at the Kernses’ door seeking shelter on the night of May 6, Ben Kerns called the Nee home. He says Joe’s mother told him Joe had punched his father and that Joe was the abusive one. “We don’t want him back,” Ben quotes her as saying. “If you don’t want him, throw him out on the street.” Tom Nee declined to be interviewed for this story.

Yet, Tom Nee keeps saying…

Tom Nee told reporters, “There was no Columbine because my son had courage and conviction to seek out a police officer.”

At one point you throw him out of your house and say you don’t want him back, then you say he had courage and conviction. It sounds like to me that a cop is refusing to admit that his son might have broken the law. But that’s just my opinion.

I still have yet to receive any comments or e-mails in defense of Joseph Nee, and this article will probably make it harder for anyone to do so.

A tragedy prevented, a town shocked:

This article seems like a year in review of the Marshfield High plot incident. It’s actually a pretty good article, but I have to take issue with a couple of things…

However parents of MHS students said the harsh media spotlight was particularly difficult for their children. At a PTO meeting shortly after the initial news conference, parents told principal Robert Keuther that many of their kids had expressed bewilderment at seeing news cameras and reporters outside their school, on top of just finding out one of their classmates may have been planning to kill them.

Oh no, not bewilderment. :-O Anything but that. In the grand scheme of things, seeing reporters outside their school is low on the list of things that will harm your child. I love it when the media and the soccer moms get together. And if the media didn’t show up, they’d be complaining about the fact that it wasn’t being reported.

This from Joseph Nee’s father…

“Everybody keeps calling this a Columbine. It’s not a Columbine because my son had the courage and conviction to come forward,” Thomas Nee said.

Coming forward to accuse someone who may not have been involved is not courage and conviction. It’s called covering your own ass and deflecting the blame.

From Joseph Nee’s attorney…

Drechsler, Nee’s attorney, pointed out that while Toby Kerns has a criminal history, getting arrested several times for breaking and entering, and that he also has been treated in a psychiatric facility, Nee has never been in trouble with a law or treated for mental illness.

Let me see, a cop’s son who has never “been in trouble with the law”. I wonder why that is. Being a cop’s son can go a long way in getting out of trouble with the local police. And just because Nee was never treated for mental illness doesn’t mean he’s not mentally ill. I offer the following as evidence of that…

Nee also reportedly wore a homemade shirt with the date of the Columbine massacre and “Remember the Heroes” – a reference to Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris – written on it in German to school several times. At one point he dressed as Harris for Halloween at school.

There’s no reportedly about it. I’ve had more than one Marshfield student e-mail me or leave me a comment that says that actually happened. Not to cast aspersions here, but I’m going to. What kind of father, let alone what kind of cop, would let their kids out of the house wearing clothes that pay tribute to known killers?

The more I read about this incident, the more I start to think that Tobin Kerns was just a scapegoat. Especially since, as I’ve said before, that so many people have contacted me in defense of Tobin Kerns and I have yet to hear from one person in defense of Joseph Nee.

That speaks volumes.

Still blind to swastikas in school:

I’m going to commit an act of lazy blogging here because I really don’t have anything else to add. Anyway, this is from an op-ed piece from The Boston Globe…

As happy as everyone should be that the plot at Marshfield was stopped, the Globe’s profile of one of the two accused youths was deeply troubling. “This was a boy unafraid of a fight, a boy who once smirked as he wore a swastika-adorned shirt through the halls of Marshfield High School,” the Globe wrote. The boy was also known to have worn a T-shirt that had the date of Columbine and “Remember the Heroes” in German.

Other students, the Globe wrote, thought the youth was “just posturing.” There was no further information about the wearing of the swastika, which leads to obvious questions. Did his parents know about the swastika, and did it not make them wonder what was in their kid’s head? Did teachers see the swastika and ignore it as a passing adolescent stupidity? Did the students who saw it feel so intimidated that they shrank into a self-defeating code of silence?

In schools across the nation, principals and superintendents are banning gang colors, which are usually associated with violent African-American and Latino boys. Yet somehow, glorification of Columbine is “just posturing.” Though Columbine and Oklahoma City demonstrated how antiblack and Jewish hate can take out lots of white, non-Jewish folks, perhaps white Americans are still tempted to look the other way at such garb because deep down, they feel the swastika is not meant for them.

If that double standard is true, then no lesson has been learned. Columbine was scary enough to result in stopping actual violence. It was not scary enough for America to make the fight against racism and anti-Semitism as mandatory as mandatory tests. With so many incidents that echo Klebold and Harris and so little done to stop the reverberation, we dare kids to go from posturing in swastikas to cooking up a massacre.

Emphasis mine.

Now here is where I insert the lazy blogger’s credo…Indeed

Cops detail Marshfield school plot at hearing:

This is real responsible journalism by the Boston Herald, isn’t it? I can imagine that editorial meeting. “Hey, I got an idea. Let’s print their plans to blow up and shoot up the school in great detail so someone else can come along and improve on their plans.”

Another thing that’s bothering me, Tobin Kerns is being held without bail but Joseph Nee, son of a Boston cop, is being held for 90 days. Is there some legal argument that I’m missing here? What happens after 90 days? Will Nee be released into his father’s custody?

Speaking of Nee’s father and his attorney…

Nee’s attorney, Tom Dreschler, punched holes in the prosecution’s argument, calling Nee the hero for revealing the plot to unsuspecting police. “A young man comes forward and the thanks he gets is the government using his words against him,” Dreschler said, adding, “They say thanks for the memories. ‘We want to lock you up.’”

Nee’s father, Tom Nee, said he was appalled.

“I don’t even want to hold a shield given what I saw today,” said the 25-year veteran.

If you come forward to the police about a murder plot, that doesn’t make you automatically innocent, especially when you’re involved in the plot. Why don’t you want to hold a shield anymore? Is it because the Marshfield police are actually doing their job? Or is it because they won’t turn a blind eye for a fellow police officer? I have the utmost respect for law enforcement, but when they start demanding special treatment for family members who are suspects, then the shield becomes a little more tarnished.

UPDATE: The Boston Globe is saying that Nee is also being held without bail.

UPDATE 2.0: From the Worcester Telegram & Gazette…

Nee has pleaded innocent to one count of conspiracy to commit mass murder and one count of promoting anarchy.

Kerns is being held without bail on eight counts of threatening to commit a crime, two counts of promoting anarchy and one count of attempt to commit a murder.

If they’re equally culpable, why are the charges so disproportional?

Second arrest was warranted:

Just a couple of more items out of Marshfield…

During Monday’s arraignment prosecutor John McLaughlin said Nee and Kerns developed a fascination about the incident at Columbine High School and Nee even did a school report on the tragedy. The two formed the group known as NBK – natural born killers in December 2003 to protect those at the high school picked on by popular kids, he said. They later came up with the plot to kill teachers and students, McLaughlin said, noting that a female student told police Nee showed a 40-caliber gun at school and said the school was going to be “shot up.”

Another student said during a meeting under a bridge in Humarock, Nee tried to recruit him to help lock doors during the planned attack to keep students and staff from escaping and showed the hit list, McLaughlin said. He also said Nee spoke of plans to have people on the roofs with rifles to keep police and fire department responders from getting into the building.

“The defendant (Nee) is just as dangerous as the individual already arrested,” McLaughlin said.

According to Kerns, Nee lived in a spare bedroom at his house for about three weeks last May after telling Toby he’d been kicked out of his house and had nowhere to go. Ben Kerns became troubled by the apparent influence Nee had over his own son, convincing him to shave his head, and putting a swastika on the spare bedroom wall. Kerns said that most of the evidence police found against Toby was discovered in the spare bedroom where Nee stayed and likely developed the plot last May.

Emphasis mine. Let me speculate here for a second. From what I’ve read so far, it sounds like that the Marshfield police went strictly on the word of a policeman’s son. By doing that, they may have possibly put the student’s lives in danger. The school and the police deny the students were ever in danger.

It’s also starting to sound like to me that Nee was the Eric Harris of the two, and Kerns was a reluctant Klebold. Then when Kerns started to turn his life around, Nee may have been afraid that Kerns would turn him in, so Nee went to the police first. Again, this is all speculation.

I’ll bring you more as it develops.

Second Teen Arrested In H.S. Massacre Case:

After receiving comments and e-mails from people close to the Kerns family, I asked the other day why aren’t police looking at Tobin Kerns’ friend, who is the son of the president of the Boston police union. I asked my readers to draw their own collusion…I mean conclusions.

That all changed today. Local police arrested Joseph Nee in his homeroom at 7:30 this morning. How does this bode for Kerns? Right now, not too good…

During the course of their investigation, officials said, they discovered that Nee, despite his status as informant was “just as dangerous” as Toby Kerns, 16, who was arrested last month in connection with the alleged massacre scheme.

So it looks like they’re holding Kerns and Nee equally responsible.

Nee’s father, Boston Police Patrolmen Association union president Thomas Nee, says that his son was the original “confidential informant” who went to police with information about the alleged plot.

As far as Nee’s status goes…

Assistant District Attorney John McLoughlin asked the court Monday to have Nee held for at least three days while prosecutors assemble their witness list and come up with a proposed bail or recommendation for a longer jail stay.

I guess we’ll know more in three days. It looks like this one won’t be over for a while.

Police union boss’s son arrested in Marshfield school plot:

Just some more pieces of information and quotes from another article…

Nee was arrested at Marshfield High around 7 a.m. and led away from the school in handcuffs.

He was ordered to return to court for a dangerousness hearing later this week. His attorney, Eric Goldman, said there is no evidence linking him to the plot.

“Mr. Nee is certainly guilty of being a distraught teenager … but he was the informant,” Goldman said.

Nee’s father, Thomas Nee, president of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, said his son lived with Kerns’ family for three weeks last spring after Nee and his son had a fight over Joseph coming home drunk.

Outside court, a tearful Thomas Nee said he was “embarrassed by the allegations,” but proud of his son for coming forward.

“I don’t care what kids talk about, as long as they don’t act it out,” he said. “I’m just thankful for one thing, that there’s been no tragedy, there’s been nobody hurt.”

Nee said he would stand by his son, one of nine children.

According to court documents, Nee had told Kerns he knew how to make a Napalm-like explosive. A search of the woods near Kerns’ home found evidence that an explosive had been detonated there, police said.