Yearbook Prank Felony Results in First-Degree Property Damage Arrest of High School Student
ByA high school student in Missouri faces a felony charge of property damage for changing another student's last name in a yearbook to read, "masturbate," ABC News reported.
Hickman High school senior Kaitlyn Booth, 17, reportedly gained access to the yearbook's final proof after staff had already approved it, Principal Dr. Tracey Conrad told the Columbia Daily Tribune. She also added that the student would face penalties with the school.
"This is the first time we've dealt with anything like this," Conrad told NBC affiliate KOMU.
Booth was arrested on May 14 and received a felony charge of first-degree property damage, in addition to a harassment charge for changing classmate Raigan Mastain's last name to "masturbate."
According to ABC News, the school did not reprint more than 700 yearbooks and instead placed a sticker with Mastain's correct surname over Booth's change. Kim Acopolis said it would cost $41,000 to reprint the 720 yearbooks that already were printed.
"I do not think [she] had any sense of the consequences that would come," Acopolis told ABC News.
Both Mastain and Acopolis did not believe Booth acted with any malicious intentions, but rather with immature judgment.
"I hardly knew her at all," Mastain, who graduated from Hickman last week, told ABC News. "I barely worked with her. We weren't friends. But I didn't think I had any problems with her."
Conrad told the Columbia Daily Tribune the process of retrieving all the yearbooks and applying the correction stickers took about 12 hours.
"The yearbook staff worked diligently to retrieve the ones that had been handed out and to put the stickers over the pages of the yearbooks that were yet to be handed out," she said.
Although Mastain did not display any strong feelings of anger toward Booth, she did express the severity of the misguided prank.
"I was kind of annoyed. It was stupid, but I wasn't that upset," she told the Columbia Daily Tribune. "When you're in high school, you do stuff that is not necessarily the smartest, and this was an example of that."