In an Instant, Message Has a Lasting Impact
Online Posting Leads to Suspension

By Preston Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 9, 2008

On his final day of winter break from Wake Forest University, Lucas Caparelli sat on the couch in his father's girlfriend's basement in Northern Virginia, surfing the Internet and messaging friends. The Chargers-Colts NFL playoff game offered background noise as Caparelli's fingers wandered the keyboard on the lazy yet fretful Sunday afternoon of Jan. 13.

Caparelli, a former All-Met kick returner from Robinson Secondary School, had found the adjustment to Wake Forest's football team much more seamless than to the esteemed North Carolina private school's social scene. He was not looking forward to returning to a place where, as a working-class public-school kid and marginal college student, he felt uncomfortable amid those he perceived as pedigreed climbers.

Using a Wake Forest-issued laptop, Caparelli banged out two sentences on his Facebook page, underneath his name and beside his picture, in the "What are you doing right now?" section.

Lucas Caparelli "recommends not going to class on Wednesday because he is going to blow up campus. For those left standing he will have an uzi locked and loaded in his bag."

Elsewhere on his page on the social networking Web site, at 3:04 p.m., under "Lucas Caparelli's Notes," he invited the school to perform a certain lewd act on him, capitalizing "MY" in between the expletives, and wrote a short poem in a style he said he patterned after the rapper Eminem:

"tomorrow I return to the hell known as wake, scares me so much that in my boots I'm starting to shake, can't find no good, a place with no pleasure, getting stabbed in the face is about the fun you can measure, surrounded by arrogant, rich, spoiled little brats, didn't earn a [expletive] thing, everything was laid in their laps, these cocky bastards are spreading like a cancer, not infecting me though because maybe I'll transfer"

The Uzi "status" posting stayed up for about 90 minutes, until Caparelli heeded the instant-message pleas of Wake Forest teammate Joe Birdsong and former Robinson teammate Ali Sayed to remove the inflammatory statement for fear of it being taken seriously. Caparelli barely gave his removed musing another thought.

Others did. A concerned Wake Forest student already had alerted campus police.

When Caparelli flew to Winston-Salem, N.C., the next day, he soon learned that impulsive boasts of pending campus violence, even ones you have no intention of carrying out, can result in a five-hour ride back to Virginia in the back seat of an unmarked campus police cruiser.

A week later, at a campus judicial hearing, Caparelli was suspended from school for the spring semester. Forsyth County (N.C.) District Attorney Tom Keith plans to review the case to determine whether he will pursue charges.

"He's out of custody, he's out of state, so he's not an immediate threat," Keith said last month.

Now, Caparelli is a former division I football player who wonders if he ever can shed that stigma of violence, living in a state about to mark the one-year anniversary of the shooting spree at Virginia Tech that killed 32 students and faculty members, perpetrated by another alienated kid from Fairfax County whose tortured writings foreshadowed his act.

The difference is, unlike Virginia Tech gunman Seung Hui Cho, who left behind a trail of warning signs, Caparelli has no such trail. He said he never has fired a gun, that he owns no weapons, "not even a pocketknife." He was not considered an angel at Robinson, but he was no troublemaker, either. He sometimes worked as the announcer for junior varsity football games, and he took a class that entailed looking after preschool children.

"He was very aggressive on the football or lacrosse field, but he certainly did not bring that into the hallways," Robinson Principal Dan Meier said. "He was a fine young man. He was motivated to get to the college level and he was hardworking."

In his first extensive interviews since the incident, the 20-year-old Caparelli, with close-cropped dark hair that gives his active eyebrows and deep-set Tootsie Roll-colored eyes plenty of leeway, comes across as relentlessly contrite, and he is running out of self-critical adjectives to describe what he did.

Earnest and agreeable but tinged with a certain toughness, he said he had never before posted such violent content online.

"It was a dumb, immature, ignorant joke, but to me, it was a joke," Caparelli, clad in Wake Forest workout gear, said recently in between weight room sessions at Robinson. "I didn't even think about it. I just put it up there and maybe took for granted that people that know me know I'm not a crazy kid and how I would never ever harm anybody.

"The way it's worded, it's going to look like I wanted it to be seen, and I wanted people to read it. But I kind of put it out there . . . almost talking to myself. I didn't send it to anybody. It wasn't directly toward anybody specifically."

His "bonehead move" was reported nationally by major news outlets. In the 10 weeks since, he has worked at an Italian-food restaurant chain that also employs his mother. He has kept in shape at Robinson. And he has tried to explain his side of the story in a series of awkward and humbling encounters with old classmates and their parents, Robinson supporters who know Caparelli as a running back who scored 66 touchdowns in high school, not as a menace to society.

On his since-shuttered Facebook page, the contents of which are part of a Wake Forest police search warrant affidavit, Caparelli listed one of his many interests as "Letting flow through writing." His "favorites" ranged from children's book "Stuart Little" to rap group Three 6 Mafia. Some of his "favorite quotes" were sexual or violent in nature, but not as pointed, or as agitated, as his Wake Forest-related postings from that Sunday afternoon.

"I felt very bad, not just because of the situation that I'd put myself in but because of the people I had let down," Caparelli said. "That was probably the hardest thing for me because there are people that I wanted to talk to, but at the same time, when I would see them, it was hard, because I knew they knew. . . . I don't want them to think, 'I thought I knew Luke, but I guess I didn't.' I want them to know that the kid that they've always known is the same guy."

A month after Caparelli's posting on Facebook, a former graduate student at Northern Illinois University drove to the school's DeKalb, Ill., campus and killed five students and wounded 18.

Caparelli's parents, Guy and Jessica, who are divorced, each say that they understood why Wake Forest had to take the threats seriously in light of the Virginia Tech shootings and other incidents of campus violence.

"I was flabbergasted," Jessica Caparelli said. "It's just not in Lucas's nature to have any propensity for violence or thoughts like that. He's always liked the ability to express himself. He's tried to write lyrics to rap songs. He's part of that culture that gets into that kind of language. I know he wouldn't follow through on anything like that."

"He has no concerns as far as violence in any part of his life," Guy Caparelli said. "He's very remorseful. He's embarrassed by what's going on. He is a very mature young man that committed an immature act."

Feeling Out of Place

Caparelli gained more than 5,000 yards during his varsity high school career, and he was rated among the top 20 senior football players in Virginia during the 2005 season. He took official recruiting visits to Virginia Tech and Wake Forest, and when he returned home from Wake Forest, he canceled scheduled visits to Virginia and Central Michigan. He had found his home.

As a college freshman in 2006, he sat out as a redshirt and watched the Demon Deacons win their first ACC football championship in 36 seasons. Last fall, he carried the ball seven times for 19 yards but dislocated his left shoulder in Wake Forest's third game, against Army. He returned later in the season, but when the problem recurred, he underwent surgery.

Wake Forest Coach Jim Grobe said he was using the Army game as an audition for all the team's running backs, and Caparelli was "right in the mix for playing time, no question."

A month after the surgery, while toilet paper still clung to trees on campus in commemoration of the Demon Deacons' victory in the Meineke Car Care Bowl on Dec. 29, Caparelli found himself suspended from school, and as a result, off the football team.

"When I heard that this had come up, I was totally shocked and really in disbelief because I've never had any problems whatsoever with Lucas," Grobe said, comparing Caparelli's infraction to airline passengers making ill-advised jokes that have to be taken seriously. "I just feel really bad for the kid because I think he's a really good kid."

Caparelli felt at home in the Demon Deacons' football program, and he speaks highly of his coaches, teammates and the Wake Forest faculty, as well as a few friends he had made outside of football, friends he says he regrets lumping into the catch-all "arrogant, rich, spoiled little brats" online rant.

But Caparelli did feel out of place at a school with a $36,560 tuition and where more than 50 percent of undergraduates study abroad. He is short on specific examples, but said encounters such as a snide comment at a party or a backward glance in the cafeteria elicited thoughts of inferiority and were "slowly poking" at him.

They eventually poked their way onto his Facebook page.

"I would get a feeling at times that because of my background, compared to some of the students' backgrounds at Wake Forest, I was maybe looked down upon, because I didn't have the money that some kids were able to have, or the resources, or I dressed differently from them," he said. Caparelli, who has not been back to Wake Forest since his campus judicial hearing, provided contact information for some of his friends there outside of the football team. One declined to comment, and others did not return phone calls.

"People still love him and we miss him and we definitely want him to come back," said Wake Forest running back Josh Adams, the 2007 ACC rookie of the year who roomed with Caparelli on road trips. "We just wish the best for him."

An Abrupt Return

The day after his Facebook postings, Caparelli flew from Dulles International Airport to Winston-Salem to start the second semester. He had no idea he was a wanted man.

He had forgotten to take his dorm room key home with him, so, locked out of his single-occupancy unit, 105B, he walked out of Poteat Residence Hall and into the courtyard, where he saw two campus police officers headed in his direction. He walked toward them, hoping they could let him into his room with their master keys.

They told Caparelli they were looking for him. When asked why, Detective James Rae replied, "Facebook."

"At the time, I didn't think I was going to get in trouble for anything," Caparelli said. "I know what he's talking about. It's easy. I'm going to explain myself."

The officers questioned Caparelli but did not arrest him. In the search warrant affidavit, Rae notes that "Mr. Caparelli stated that he would never hurt anyone on campus or do anything against the school. He stated that the words he used . . . were that like music rapper writes. Words only an expression, and not something that is actually done."

According to the affidavit, Caparelli granted permission for police to search his room and bags, and he willingly surrendered his laptop. Told by a school administrator to leave campus, and Winston-Salem, until his campus judicial hearing, Caparelli went home the next day.

Rae referred an interview request to Kevin Cox, Wake Forest's director of media relations, who said the campus police and administration would have no comment on Caparelli.

A week after that ride back to Fairfax, Caparelli returned to Wake for his campus judicial hearing and gave his account of what he had written online.

"I wanted them to know that just because I was writing this, this is not the life that I live or who I am," Caparelli said.

Wake Forest suspended Caparelli for the spring semester.

He has since launched a new Facebook page, stripped of most personal effects, and said he is choosier about to whom he grants access.

'A Very Hard Lesson'

Caparelli said if he wants to return to Wake Forest, he will have to reapply and undergo psychological evaluations. He plans to submit to the testing regardless, so he will have a clean bill of mental health to show any interested school.

Cox wrote in an e-mail that Wake Forest's Committee on Academic Affairs -- six faculty members, two administrators and a student -- rules on requests for readmission. He added that he could not discuss the process in reference to Caparelli in particular.

Grobe said that any discussion of Caparelli returning to the football team would be premature.

"His main hurdle will be getting readmitted to school," Grobe said. "Were he to get readmitted to school, then we would certainly look at the possibility of bringing him back on the football team."

Why, though, would Caparelli want to return to the school that apparently had made him so miserable?

"If I were to go back in front of the board and they did ask me that question," Caparelli said, "I would just be as truthful as possible and I would explain to them the differences that I saw with myself and some other people at Wake and express maybe my distaste for some things and try to explain to them that I did feel that."

Robinson football coach Mark Bendorf said two colleges -- one an NCAA division I-A school and the other a I-AA school -- have called him in recent weeks to inquire about Caparelli's status. He expects more inquiries in May, when college coaches make their annual recruiting visits to evaluate rising high school seniors.

"He's learned a very hard lesson that I don't think he'll ever forget," Bendorf said. "You don't want it to be a death blow to his academic and athletic career and aspirations."

Marginal prospects who wish to be offered a scholarship often are encouraged by the fact that they have to persuade only one coach to get the opportunity to play in college. Caparelli, once a hot commodity, is in a similar position. But he also has considered the possibility of that opportunity not coming.

"I don't call it taking a chance, but people are going to call it taking a chance on me," he said. "I just think it's going to come down to that person saying: 'I really believe this kid. He made a dumb mistake, and we're willing to give him a second chance.' "