By SCOT PEARSON
SOUTH BEND - Using the social media Snapchat, a student in the South Bend School District was expelled almost as soon as they showed up to school on Oct. 27.
"We have taken the case to the prosecutor's office to see exactly where we stand," said South Bend Police Chief David Eastham.
It is believed that a picture of a gun was loaded into the social media application and was shared around the school to students via the "story" feature of the program.
The incident was part of a series of events leading to the emergency expulsion of the student that have been tracked since last week. The incident is still under investigation.
"Safety of our students is our utmost concern. With recent incidents in the news, we do not take events like this lightly," said South Bend High School Principal Jason Nelson.
"I have to say the school handled this incident quickly and correctly," remarked Eastham.
No one at school was in any danger based on the incident. The student has been expelled for a period of up to 10 days and can appeal the expulsion.
Snapchat is a social media application that many people use on their smart phones in a way to communicate quickly with text and pictures or videos.
One of the features of the program is that the image sent will disappear after a set amount of time and is no longer on the device sent to. The image does go to a server database and is kept there. The original sender of the Snapchat message cannot get the original picture from the database, and the receiver of the message may be able to retain the image if their device has a picture capture quick key.