WEST MEMPHIS, Ark. – – A West Memphis man is behind bars after allegedly threatening to shoot up his high school reunion in Jonesboro. 38 year old Mohammad Darabi was arrested at a his home off Garden Lane last week. He’s charged with making a terroristic threat.
He’s part of the Jonesboro High School class of 1998.
“For something like this to happen. It’s scary,” classmate Jade Bradley says.
The class’s 20th reunion at the Elks Lodge was cancelled because of the alleged threat. Jonesboro police say Darabi called the lodge in recent weeks and threatened to “shoot the place up” if the reunion wasn’t cancelled. Investigators say he posted his intentions on Facebook too.
“If this guy had just shown up and shot everybody, holy crap, that’s a lot of people,” Bradley says, “We had several hundred people in our class. That’s a lot of lives at stake.”
Bradley barely remembers Darabi and says she doesn’t know why he’d do something like that.
“Who cares enough about a high school reunion to want to shoot it up?” Bradley says.
She says her friends remember him better.
“They said he had a hard time. He had a rough youth from what I understand,” Bradley says.
The alleged threat is especially unnerving for this class. They were all seniors when a mass shooting happened at Westside Middle School.
“Unfortunately, that’s one of the things that Jonesboro is put on the map for is our Westside school shooting and you don’t want to have a repeat of something similar,” Bradley says.
The reunion is being re-scheduled but Bradley might not go. She says it largely depends on whether or not Darabi is still in jail. Many of her classmates likely feel the same way.
