Ontario Christian High School in Ontario, California, narrowly averted a mass shooting incident. Eighteen-year-old Sebastian Villaseñor was charged on Wednesday with one count of attempted criminal threat and five counts of attempted murder. He was arraigned on Thursday and is being held without bail.
An 18-year-old student at Ontario Christian High School has been arrested and charged after investigators learned that he planned to shoot five students at his school and had researched police response times and tactical supplies, Ontario Police Chief Michael Lorenz said Wednesday, Feb. 14.
Investigators learned that Sebastian Bailey Villaseñor “was fixated on school shootings and had access to weapons,” Lorenz said.
One of his potential victims went to Ontario High School Principal Benjamin Dykhouse to report their suspicions. To Dykhouse's credit, he took the threat seriously and alerted the Ontario Police..
Update on school shooting plot averted by tip from a student this week.
— K-12 School Shooting Database (@K12ssdb) February 17, 2024
An 18-year-old Ontario Christian High School (CA) student who was plotting to shoot five fellow students developed his hate-based and neo-nazi ideologies online.
High school senior “was fixated on school… pic.twitter.com/ghy7rdgHf5
The criminal complaint said he targeted five “Jane Doe” students at the school.
Villaseñor was being held without bail at West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga. The county jail log shows he was arrested at a home in Eastvale.
Ontario Police Chief Michael Lorenz said, at the Thursday press conference outlining the incident and the charges, that Villaseñor had an obsession with the Columbine shooting, and law enforcement surmised that Villaseñor planned to mount his attack on April 20, the anniversary of the Columbine massacre.
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When the Ontario Police searched the home, they found over 1,000 rounds of ammunition, seven rifles, two revolvers, one handgun, and one shotgun. On Friday, Ontario PD released additional photos showing Villaseñor taking selfies with various weapons.
Note that the firearm Villaseñor is posing with is a pistol grip AR-15. He is also holding a 30-round magazine. This is CALIFORNIA, where both the AR-15 and the magazine over 10 rounds are illegal. In Governor Gavin Newsom's shadow campaign for president, he is all over creating a constitutional amendment to ban guns, and spends his time on the social media platform X excoriating constitutional carry states on their gun laws and gun violence. Yet as of this writing, he hasn't even bothered to mention this incident that occurred in his state under his watch.
Aside from a few national outlets, this story has received little press outside of California. There are a number of reasons for this.
No Bleeding, No Leading.
Thanks to the due diligence of Ontario Christian High School Principal Benjamin Dykhouse and law enforcement, this potentially tragic incident was completely averted. After the epic failures of Parkland and Uvalde, Principal Dykhouse and the Ontario Police Department should be getting nationwide coverage and commendations up the wazoo. But we live in an upside-down world.
Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz was allowed to continue to walk the school's halls, even with almost 70 incidents of violence on record, boasting online of being “the next school shooter,” and many reports of threatening behavior from others. These reports were ignored by local law enforcement and the FBI, and as a result, 17 people died. Six years later, the gun grabbers and their spokesman David Hogg, who use Parkland as their claim to fame, milk this for all its worth. But in Ontario, there is nothing to milk, nor is there a gun-control narrative that can be built.
Villaseñor and His Family Do Not Fit a Convenient Narrative.
From the photos, and if we are to go by his name, Villaseñor is not Caucasian. So, it would be a stretch to posit any claims of white supremacy. I'm sure some Taylor Lorenz-type is digging to see if they can find a selfie of him with a MAGA hat, but as far as can be ascertained from Chief Lorenz' Thursday press conference, Villaseñor was an awkward young man who had trouble connecting with others and this caused him to go down a rabbit hole.
Lorenz said Villaseñor was not a loner or considered troubled, nor had he been bullied. But he had difficulty forming relationships and with social interactions.
Dykhouse said the arrest was proof that security and the see-something-say-something culture at the school worked but that the school would be “bolstering what is in place.”
There was no carnage for the national media to use to push their agenda, and no chum to foment anger or protests on the part of the usual suspects in order to drive the news cycle; therefore, the story was bypassed.
According to reports, Villaseñor's parents are fully cooperating. The guns which were found in the home belong to Villaseñor's father. They were legally owned and properly secured, as California law requires.
None of the weapons or ammunition belonged to the suspect but were legally owned by his father who had them safely locked away in the family home, the chief said.
So, unlike the Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley and the subsequent indictment and conviction of his mother Jennifer Crumbley, there were no huge warning signs. Again, because the legacy media lacks fodder to drive their preferred gun-control narrative or neglectful parent narrative, and they have no desire to actually study real causations, it dies. Even if Villaseñor's story had gone national, with the known information, it would have disappeared as quickly as the Lakewood shooter story.
We Still Ignore the Mental Health Aspect
At the Thursday press conference, Ontario PD Chief Lorenz said Villaseñor was obsessed with mass shootings, particularly Columbine, and actually used Google Maps to gauge the response time from the Ontario Police Department to Ontario Christian High School in the event of a shooting. This degree of obsession points to a mental imbalance of some kind; whether that imbalance was induced by medication or lack of it, is yet to be ascertained. Here's the good news: Sebastian Villaseñor can get some serious help and I pray he does. What a tragedy that this help will be coming through the penal system, but he will at least be getting focused care.
But what of the other young men and women who could use some focused care, but are being ignored? While there are supposedly resources being poured out to address this, what do we find being pushed by school systems? Gender-affirming care and activist curricula. Destroying children, especially boys, started way back in the '90s with blanket diagnoses and over-medicating for ADHD, and has now progressed to genital mutilation. A majority of school shooters are male, and the one school shooter who was not a biological male was a sexually confused woman going through the process of gender transition. So, instead of addressing behavioral or mental issues in our youth, society has chosen pharmaceuticals and make-believe. This will not end well, especially if we keep ignoring this aspect.
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