“Somebody posted a picture of themselves and a young girl, and the caption was photos that shouldn’t be posted.” Michael said the photo wasn’t particularly provocative, but it caught a lot of peoples’ attention. They did a reverse Google image search, and that led them to over 700 pictures in an unprotected online photo album.
“There were about 713 [photos] of this person and this young girl with videos and everything else. So upon further searching online, we figured out immediately that it was a teacher at Brookwood and a student, and then it kind of blew up from there,” Michael said.
There were possibly hundreds of people that started either researching or simply following the story on the forum. “We literally have the entire story. From start to finish, we even did a graph and sent it along with all of the stuff. We notified the school, we notified the friends, we notified the family,” he said.
WIAT asked Michael why he–and so many others–took so much interest in this story.
“Because there’s no excuse. Even if she was 18, that’s still not an excuse,” he explains. “I don’t care if the student was 21. You’re a teacher, you’re in charge of that student,” he replied.
Michael said he started collecting information and screenshots to alert the police. However, some of the other people involved had different ideas about how to handle the situation. Michael said the teacher was the person who initially posted that first photo on 4chan, and he began to interact with the others online.
“I watched it as it went down,” Michael said. “They were threatening to expose him if he didn’t do certain stuff. So they were having him put the website name on his forehead and do the loser image with his thumb and finger in front of his forehead. We were humiliating him as we were ratting him out.”
However, Michael said the group’s goal all along was to make sure the teacher didn’t get away with it. “Everybody had their own agenda,” he said, “but it was coming to the same conclusion.”
