A Florida family filed a lawsuit after their 13-year-old was wrongly arrested when a classmate posed as her and made damning threats.
Nia Whims, a former student at Renaissance Charter School in Pemboke Pines, was taken into custody after a fellow student created a fake profile pretending to be her. The student, identified as M.S., then sent messages from the fake profile to herself and a teacher, threatening to blow up the school and kill people. The teacher reported the incident to school officials, and Whims was taken into custody on November 19th.
As a result of the mistaken identity case, the teenager spent several days at a juvenile detention center on a felony charge of making a written threat to do bodily harm or commit an act of terrorism. She was ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation before being released on November 29th. M.S. has now been charged with written threats to kill or do bodily harm and falsifying a police report. Reports show that Whims reported was continuously bullied by M.S. and even requested a meeting with school officials to remedy the situation, though it never took place. Her mother, Lezlie-Ann Davis, eventually pulled Whims out of the school after the bullying persisted with no intervention. Now, Whims’ family is demanding justice.
According to their lawsuit, the Pembroke Pines Police Department arrested Whims without properly investigating “easily discoverable information.” Instagram and its parent company, Meta, formerly Facebook, are also mentioned in the suit. Whims endured much of the bullying on these apps.
“They need to make sure they do their homework prior to putting our children in handcuffs and locking them up,” stated the family’s attorney, Marwan Porter. Whims also spoke out, calling the ordeal “heartbreaking.”
