Avast! You just can’t be too safe these days, maties, which is why officials at a rural Michigan high school locked down the campus because a former student showed up dressed as a pirate and wielding a plastic sword.
The corsair kerfuffle occurred on Monday afternoon at Dansville High School in the tiny town of Dansville (pop.: 563), reports the Lansing State Journal.
“Shiver me timbers!” the officials must have exclaimed as they spotted the 19-year-old former student. They acted quickly and decisively, locking down the entire K-12 campus for about 30 minutes (starting at approximately 12:45 p.m.)
The unidentified male teen was in town to play Dungeons & Dragons, the celebrated fantasy role-playing game. He was carrying a backpack containing some cards — and probably more than a few complicated dice. He was carrying the toy sword. He was wearing leggings as well as a nifty sash around his waist, a spokesman for the local sheriff’s office told the State Journal.
After some kind of argument with his Dungeons & Dragons partner, the teen has decided to head over to the high school to try to catch a school bus back to his home in nearby Holt, Mich.
Sheriff’s deputies accosted the pirate garb-festooned teen. They determined he posed no threat but told him he’d have to leave school property.
The kid’s mother then picked him up.
Is Monday’s lockdown of a taxpayer-funded school because somebody saw somebody dressed like a pirate a first in America? No! A very similar incident occurred in 2014 in the small town of Richlands, N.C.
The 2014 freebooter fracas happened on International Talk Like A Pirate Day — Sept. 19 (every year) — and resulted in a four-school lockdown because a cafeteria worker saw an elementary school teacher dressed up as a pirate and mistook the plastic sword part of the costume as a gun. The quartet of lockdowns lasted for about three hours. Law enforcement officials searched the schools for a “suspicious person.” They brought police dogs. The “suspicious person” was not found during the lockdown despite intense efforts. No students or teachers were allowed to leave their schools throughout the duration of the lockdowns. (RELATED: Teacher’s Plastic Sword On ‘Talk Like A Pirate Day’ Caused FOUR-SCHOOL LOCKDOWN)
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