A NEW CASUALTY OF COLUMBINE 
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LAKEWOOD STUDENT QUITS AFTER ARREST, FALSE ACCUSATION
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By Chris Seper <br />Plain Dealer Reporter
<br />Monday,August 21, 2000
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Greg Miller had plans for April 20, the first anniversary of the Columbine shootings. He was going to sleep in.
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Lakewood High School had been buzzing with wild rumors of hidden bombs and cliques of students ready to come to class with guns blazing. Greg, a 15-year-old freshman, said he didn't want to go to school April 20 "with all that paranoia."

<br /><br />Besides, he liked sleep better than school.

But Greg hadn't heard the hottest rumor - the one about himself. Two days before the anniversary, police and the principal pulled him out of the cafeteria because students said they had heard him say he was going to "shoot some people." In his pocket they found a knife with a thick, 3-inch locking blade.

<br /><br />He was tossed into jail, expelled and, over the next three months, forced to go toe-to-toe with the juvenile justice system.

<br /><br />But Greg never planned to shoot anyone. The accusations were bogus. The charges against him were eventually dismissed, and police are now investigating a student who pointed him out in the first place.

<br /><br />At a final hearing in Juvenile Court, Judge Joseph Russo apologized to him. Greg's parents say their son has become a teenage casualty in the battle to stop the next Columbine or Jonesboro.

<br /><br />Lakewood police and school officials believe they did their jobs. They heard a rumor, assessed a threat and eliminated it. Chances are, Greg would have been expelled anyway, because of the knife.

<br /><br />But he's not a killer. Yet, when he walks the streets of Lakewood, kids he doesn't know yell, "Hey Greg, are you going to shoot up the school today?"
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Greg's high school years, and his innocence, are lost.
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Greg was older than the rest of his classmates because of his late birthday. He dyed his long hair black. He wore black shirts and jeans and, often, a long black trench coat. His grades were bad. By his own admission, he probably would have flunked some of his classes for the year.
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He likes working with his hands. School isn't his thing.
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"I can't do math, and I can't write stories," he said.
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Greg describes his friends as "the people you see sitting in the back of the room never talking to anybody." One of his closest pals has had three nervous breakdowns. They play "Magic: The Gathering," a popular fantasy card game, listen to music ranging from Aerosmith to Kid Rock and discuss "how Pokemon is not cool."
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"We're not loners," Greg said. "We just don't like hanging out with a lot of people."
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Greg and his friends used to have much of their fun in Kaufman Park. But that ended with his arrest.
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According to a police report, a student's aunt told school officials about a threat a few days before the Columbine anniversary. She said her niece had heard a teenager say three weeks earlier at Kaufman Park that he wanted to kill some classmates at Lakewood High. Other students, according to the aunt, also heard it.
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Police questioned the students, who said the boy claimed to have a death list that included athletes. The students said they overheard the boy say he wanted to kill all the people he hated in Lakewood and that he wished he "had the guts" to go into the high school and kill people the way the students in Colorado had.
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Police had two descriptions, the report said. He was either 6 feet 1 inch tall with long brown hair and wore a ball cap and a tan or black jacket, or had black hair in a ponytail and owned a black trench coat.
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One of the girls joined police and Principal Vincent Barra in the lunchroom the afternoon of April 18. She picked out Greg, who is 5 feet 7.
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Greg was at a table playing "Magic" with his friends. He had his jacket hood pulled over his head because people were trying to throw things in his hair. He was escorted out of the lunchroom and taken to the principal's office, where they found the knife and arrested him for inducing panic and carrying a concealed weapon.
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He spent the next 10 days in the Cuyahoga County Detention Center. He got along with some youths there, but others kicked him as he walked up stairs or tried to yank his scraggly hair. He began sleeping on his back, his arms folded over his chest, after a youth who got in trouble for hassling him threatened revenge.
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"That way, at least, if someone jumped on me I could push them off," he said.
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Russo was going to keep Greg in jail another week, until his first court hearing, after a magistrate said he was a danger to the community. But Greg was released after his parents promised to take him out of state for the family's first-ever vacation.
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As the Millers took their bittersweet trip to North Carolina, the criminal case started to fall apart. The Lakewood Police Department's investigation hadn't gone much beyond the students' statements. Police never searched the Millers' home, which would have helped gauge whether the threat was real. Instead, police called Greg's parents and asked if there were weapons in the house. They said there weren't.
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After reading through the file, Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Lawrence Rifalsky asked Lakewood police to check the students' accusations further. At that point, some of the girls recanted, and Greg's main accuser stopped cooperating with police.
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"What they turned up made me realize the information was not reliable," Rifalsky said.
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He then offered the Millers a deal. Greg would plead guilty to the weapons possession charge. But when the case reached Russo, he dismissed it under a rule that allows judges to dismiss a charge if it's in the best interest of the child and community.
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"He had been more than punished for that" knife, Russo said.
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<strong><big>No apologies for Millers</big></strong>
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But there isn't much sympathy for Greg Miller. It's clear he didn't plan to kill, but police, city and school officials are satisfied with what they did.
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Police Chief Dan Clark said he wouldn't change a thing.
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"I can feel for the Miller family for having gone through that," he said. "But our main goal is to protect the safety of the kids in that school.
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"Are we living in a hypervigilant time? Yes," Clark said. " Greg Miller was a victim of that hypervigilance."
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Clark said police were more suspicious of Greg because his brother, Carl, pleaded guilty a year earlier for scrawling a bomb threat on a public bathroom in the Cleveland Metroparks Rocky River Reservation. The message said a bomb would go off in a Lakewood High principal's office on May 14, 1999, which sent school administrators and police scrambling.
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And, Barra said, Greg would have been expelled for carrying the knife no matter what happened.
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The Millers say they are a family of whittlers. Greg said that for a time, he carried the knife because he feared being attacked, but he stopped bringing it to school long ago. He said he didn't realize he had it the day he was arrested.
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Greg's father, Joseph, said Greg shouldn't have been held accountable for his brother's past. His mother, Carla Heritage- Miller, accused police and school officials of conducting a "witch hunt."
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"I think they wanted to look good to everyone around the Columbine anniversary and used my son as a scapegoat," she said.
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"I was married when I was 16 and didn't have to experience a lot of things in high school," Heritage- Miller said. "I had hoped Greg would get a chance to do that."
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Greg's goal is simply to regain lost friends.
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"I just want people to know it was a mistake," he said. "It was because of the way I dress. I'm not evil. I don't have 6-6-6' on my forehead."
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When Greg's classmates start their sophomore year Aug. 29, he'll probably have already started high school equivalency classes at Cuyahoga Community College. His parents thought of moving to get him in another school district, but they can't afford it, and Greg doesn't want to, now that he has a girlfriend.
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Greg could rejoin his classmates but fears harassment after being branded the school's Columbine kid.
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"I thought about going back, just to let them know they couldn't screw me," Greg said. "But then I thought, no.
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"I refuse to go 100 yards near that school."


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