Post by jadedsage on Apr 27, 2004 11:51:32 GMT -5
This story was published Saturday, April 24th, 2004
By Annette Cary Herald staff writer
PROSSER -- U.S. Secret Service agents were in Prosser on Friday afternoon to interview a 15-year-old art student about political drawings he had shown his Prosser High School teacher.
The student turned in several sketches keyed to the war in Iraq as part of an art class assignment to keep a notebook of drawings, said Kevin Cravens, a Richland friend of the student's family.
The most controversial one showed a man in what appeared to be Middle-Eastern-style clothing with an AK-47 rifle.
He was holding a stick with the oversized head of President Bush on it. The student said the head was enlarged because it was intended to be an effigy, Cravens said. The caption called for an end to the war in Iraq.
Another sketch showed Bush dressed as a devil and launching a missile. The caption read "End the war -- on terrorism."
Another drawing urged votes for Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nadar.
The teacher turned the drawings over to school administrators.
"We involve the police anytime we have a concern," said Prosser Superintendent Ray Tolcacher. "From our perspective it was an incident that needed to be reported to the police on campus."
It was not a freedom of speech issue, but a concern over the depiction of violence, he said.
The school resource officer was unsure of what to do with the pictures, said Prosser Police Chief Win Taylor. But officers decided the best response was to contact the Secret Service in Spokane.
"From what I saw, (school officials) were right to be concerned," Taylor said.
They were not drawings that he would characterize as political cartoons, he said.
Copies of the pencil and ink drawings were faxed to Secret Service officers, who then came to Prosser on Friday to interview the student.
A parent was present when agents interviewed the student.
The Secret Service did not return calls to the Herald about the case on Friday afternoon. The family also declined to talk about what happened.
The student is not named because he is not charged with a crime.
The school district took a disciplinary action, Tolcacher said.
He refused to say what that was, but said the student was not suspended.
"If this 15-year-old kid in Prosser is perceived as a threat to the president, then we are living in 1984," Cravens said.
