On the second day of school this year in Hamilton County, Tennessee, Ty chose a purple rabbit from the hundreds of other stuffed animals in his room. While his mom wasn’t looking, the 13-year-old hid it in his backpack to show his friends.
It was the 10th anniversary of his favorite video game franchise, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and Bonnie the rabbit is one of the stars. Ty has autism and Bonnie is his biggest comfort when he’s worried or down. No one but Ty, not even his mother, is allowed to touch Bonnie.
Ty was a freshman at Ultewah High School, located east of Chattanooga. In class that morning, he told his teacher that he didn’t want anyone to look in his backpack for fear of confiscating his toy, according to Ty and his mom. When the teacher asked why, Ty said, “Because the whole school is going to blow up,” he and his mom recalled.
School officials acted quickly, Ty’s mom said: A teacher who had known Ty for just one day called the school administrator, who called the police. They brought Ty to the counselor’s office and found Bonnie in her backpack. As Ty stood there, he said, confused about what he had done wrong, police handcuffed him and patted him down before putting him in the back of a police car.
“I think they thought I had a real bomb in my backpack,” Tye told ProPublica and WPLN. But he did not have a bomb. “It was just here,” he said as he held Bonnie. “And they still put me in jail.”
The sheriff’s department issued a news release about the incident, saying police checked the backpack and “it was found to not contain an explosive device.” ProPublica and WPLN are using a pseudonym for Ty at the request of his mother to protect his identity because he is a minor. The sheriff’s department did not respond to questions about Ty’s case. The Hamilton County School District, which includes Ty’s school, declined to respond, even though his mother signed a form giving officials permission to do so.
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Tye’s arrest was the result of a new state law requiring anyone who threatens mass violence at a school to be charged with a felony. The law does not require that the threat be believable. ProPublica and WPLN an 11-year-old child with autism was previously reported who denied making threats in the classroom and was later arrested at a birthday party by a Hamilton County sheriff’s deputy.
During this year’s legislative session, advocates warned Tennessee lawmakers that the law would be especially harmful to students prone to frequent outbursts or disruptive behavior as a result of their disabilities.
Lawmakers included an exception for people with intellectual disabilities. And according to Ty’s mother and the school district’s psychological report, Ty has an intellectual disability in addition to autism as defined by Tennessee statute. But the family’s attorney said there’s no evidence law enforcement took that into consideration — or even checked to see if Ty had a disability — before handcuffing and arresting him.
The law does not specify how police must determine whether children have an intellectual disability before charging them. Rep. Cameron Sexton, speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives and a GOP co-author of the bill, said Tye’s case shows that “more training and resources may be needed” for school officials and law enforcement.
Representative Bo Mitchell, a Nashville Democrat who co-sponsored the legislation, said he hoped the exemption for children with intellectual disabilities would be enough to prevent students like Ty from being arrested. “No one passed this law to take a child with any kind of disability for a fee,” he said.
But he said the law is still needed to prevent false threats that disrupt learning and terrorize students. “I don’t know whose level of trauma is going to be the greatest: kids in a classroom wondering if there’s an active shooter walking around their hall, or a kid who doesn’t know any better and says something like that and gets arrested,” Mitchell said . “It’s a win-win situation.”
The state does not collect information on how the felony law, which took effect in July, applies to children with disabilities like Ty. Data from Hamilton County provide limited information. During the first six weeks of the school year, 18 children were arrested for threats of mass violence. A third of them have disabilities, which is more than twice the share of students with disabilities in the district.
Before the start of the school year, Taya’s mom sent an email to the school administration asking for help to make her son’s eighth grade transition as smooth as possible.
Ty’s special education plan says he is social and friendly with other students, but has regular outbursts and tantrums in the classroom because of his disability. He has difficulty regulating his feelings when asked to follow instructions in the classroom and understand social situations and boundaries.
Federal law prohibits his school from severely punishing him for such behavior because it is caused by or related to his disability. But Ty’s principal later told his mother in an email that Tennessee’s law on threats of mass violence requires school officials to report the incident to police.
When Ty’s mother got the call that her son was about to be arrested, she said her worst fear had come true: her son’s autism had been mistaken for a threat. “After you looked at his backpack, if there was nothing in there that could harm anyone, why did you handcuff my 13-year-old autistic son, who didn’t understand what was going on, and take him to a juvenile detention center ?” she said.
Disability rights advocates said children like Ty shouldn’t be arrested under current law. And they tried to get a broader exemption for children with other types of disabilities.
In a meeting with Mitchell before the law’s passage, Zoe Jamail, policy coordinator for Tennessee Disability Rights, explained that the legislation could harm children with disabilities who have communication and behavioral difficulties — such as certain developmental disabilities — but are not diagnosed with intellectual disability. She suggested wording that Mitchell and other sponsors could include in the law to ensure that children with disabilities are not wrongfully arrested.
“No student who makes a threat defined as a manifestation of the student’s disability shall be charged under this section,” one version of the amendment reads.
The amendment never came up for a vote in the state legislature. Instead, lawmakers adopted a narrower version.
“I think it shows a lack of understanding of disability,” Jamail said.
Sexton, the Republican House speaker, said children with disabilities are capable of committing acts of mass violence and should be punished under the law. “I think you can find a lot of excuses for a lot of people,” he said.
Ty still doesn’t fully understand what happened to him and why.
On a recent October morning, Ty turned the stuffed bunny to his mom and asked, “Is he the reason I can’t bring any more stuffed bunnies?”
Ty’s mom told him the reason was because he didn’t ask first. “You can’t just take things out of the house like that,” she said.
“Am I going to get in trouble for this?” he asked her.
“Yes, definitely,” she said. “Do you want them to maybe think it’s another bomb and take you back to the children’s prison?”
“No,” he said firmly.
After the incident, Tai High School suspended him for several days. His case was soon dismissed in juvenile court.
The principal told Ty’s mom in an email that if Ty said something like that again, the school would follow the same protocol. She decided to transfer him out of Ooltewah High School as soon as she could.
“Every time we pass that school, Ty says, ‘Am I going back to jail, mom?’ Are you taking me there?” He’s really traumatized,” she said. “I felt like no one at that school was fighting for him. They were too busy justifying what they did.’
Mitchell, a Democrat, said he was “heartbroken” to hear that Tye was handcuffed and injured. But, he added, “we’re trying to stop people who should know better from doing it, and if they do, they should get more than a slap on the wrist.” He said he would be open to considering an exception in the law in the upcoming legislative session for children with a broader range of disabilities.
But, he said, he believes the law as it stands now makes all children in Tennessee, with or without disabilities, safer.
