Sixty minutes. That’s how long it took for a private Snapchat message to travel from Kristen Volpe’s phone to the FBI to the deputies standing in her elementary school hallway. On January 29, 2025, the 22-year-old student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois, vented to her boyfriend and two roommates — three people total — after a student closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan. She referenced shooting the student or the school. She meant it as a frustrated joke. Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor.
No student reported her. No parent. No coworker. The flag was entirely automated. Snapchat’s policy permits voluntary emergency disclosures to law enforcement — no warrant required — when the platform determines imminent harm exists. The algorithm makes that initial call. Think of it like your Ring doorbell deciding to call 911 on its own, except the doorbell is reading your text messages.
So what awful setup was she running where the laptop doesn’t just sleep on lid close, and the document isn’t still there on wake? Who prepares a document to work from that isn’t saved?
The rest is some 1984 bullshit, but I’m wondering what the hell is wrong with that laptop.
Yeah, that’s a cursed setup, must be set to shutdown on lid close, but also it doesn’t hang if there is an unsaved document like every other time?
And no habitual Ctrl+s after every sentence or two? If the kid didn’t wipe her work, a random windows crash or forced update would have.
Might be a Windows user who set to shutdown on lid close because otherwise you open your bag to find a hot laptop with a dead battery, sleep doesn’t really work on Windows for years now.
Hmm, that is true.
I always just pressed the shutdown button if I was putting it in a bag. If I was only moving from one place to another, then I wouldn’t want it turn off for just closing it.