Lollapalooza guard charged with making false terrorism threat to get out of work

Maybe Kim Kardashian was right that nobody wants to get up off their asses and work anymore, but fabricating a mass shooting to get out of work is taking things a bit far, no? The 18-year-old Lollapalooza guard who allegedly did just that was clearly not using her best judgment; if she wanted to use a timely emergency to get out of work, monkeypox might have been the better bet.

Unfortunately, the teen was allegedly willing to go for broke and double down on her faux shooting threat. Per The Chicago Tribune, a witness testified that the young woman sent her a message via TextNow that read “Mass shooting at 4pm location Lollapalooza. We have150 targets.” The witness alerted her supervisors, and the alarming threat made its way all the way up to the FBI Joint Counterterrorism Task Force.

The 18-year-old then further claimed to the witness that her sister saw a post about the threat on Facebook. When asked for a screenshot, she (allegedly) made a fake account under the name “Ben Scott,” and wrote a post that said, “Massive shooting at Lollapalooza Grant Park 6 p.m.”

It apparently didn’t take much work to connect this young woman’s IP address and Apple iCloud to the incriminating messages. When she was questioned by police, she reportedly said she did it “because she wanted to leave work early.” It’s the mark of a true dystopia that today’s teens would jump straight to fake shooting threat excuses rather than something more mundane like a grandma dying, or another old classic of that nature.

This deeply unpleasant scenario resulted in the 18-year-old being charged with making a false terrorism threat and held in lieu of $50,000 bail. The sad story has the smack of Gen Z dark comedy all over it–move over, Not Okay, real life appears to have outdone the art.