It's become the modern-day equivalent of "The Devil made me do it." People are blaming a television show for another attempted mass murder.
Jerrold Sharp, a fraternity advisor at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, says that accused blackmailer Olutosin Oduwole might have been imitating the Cartoon Network's Robot Chicken when he demanded $50,000 or he would engage in a Virginia Tech-style massacre.
During an episode of the popular stop-motion show, a character holds a gun to a chicken's head, with a threat that the bird will be killed unless enough money is raised.
An episode of Robot Chicken, titled "Lust for Puppets," is nominated for the Prime Time Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program (Programming Less Than One Hour in length).
"Like anybody who has really done music, you have your notebook, you just write out all your ideas. He had an idea in print -- he got it from another medium," Sharp told The Belleville News-Democrat newspaper, which was repeated on the website Crime News. "It was an idea that was printed on paper and that was it."
Sharp believed that the threat was a misplaced joke by Oduwole, an aspiring rapper and president of the local chapter of the Iota Phi Theta fraternity.
The 22-year-old SIUE student was arrested on July 20th and charged with weapons possession and making a terrorist threat. Police say they found a loaded Highpoint .380 semi-automatic pistol in his apartment, and discovered that he had also ordered three more pistols and an Ingram Mac-10 machine gun.
A gun dealer alerted the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives about Oduwole because he "appeared very anxious to get these firearms and seemed very impatient," according to the affidavit.
Police also said that a note found in Oduwole's car demanded that $50,000 be deposited to a PayPal account, and threatened that "if this account doesn't reach $50,000 in the next 7 days then a murderous rampage similar to the (Virgina Tech) shooting will occur at another highly populated university. THIS IS NOT A JOKE!"
On April 16, VT student Cho Seung-Hui murdered 32 people and injured 25 others before killing himself.
Oduwole had initially written "prestigious" in the demand, but later crossed it out and replaced it with "populated." There was no direct mention of SIUE in the note, and Oduwole had written rap lyrics on the other side.
Oduwole has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is being held on $1.1 million bond.
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