A Texas fourth grader was suspended Friday after he brought his “one ring” to school and threatened to make another student disappear. According to New York Daily News, Kermit Elementary School officials thought 9-year-old Aiden Steward’s act of make-believe was actually something more threatening:
Kermit Elementary School officials called it a threat when the 9-year-old boy, Aiden Steward, in a playful act of make-believe, told a classmate he could make him disappear with a ring forged in fictional Middle Earth’s Mount Doom.
“It sounded unbelievable,” the boy’s father, Jason Steward, told the Daily News. He insists his son “didn’t mean anything by it.”
Steward spoke further on the school’s decision to suspend his son:
“I assure you my son lacks the magical powers necessary to threaten his friend’s existence,” the boy’s father later wrote in an email. “If he did, I’m sure he’d bring him right back.”
Well that settles it, then. If kids with magical rings forged in the fire of Mount Doom can bring their victims back from invisible nothingness, suspension is hardly warranted. Permanent invisibility, however, is another matter entirely.
