In June 2021, Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno arrested a 10-year-old boy for allegedly making written threats to commit a school shooting at his elementary school in text messages to a friend. Letitia Kim stated that the messages did not contain any kind of threat but did include Google images of assault rifles. At the time of the arrest, Marceno deemed the messages to be a "fake threat", but arrested him anyways stating "this child made a fake threat, and now he's experiencing real consequences". The boy's father maintained his son's innocence, stating the texts about money and guns were a bad joke about scamming a friend out of money and were not a threat. FAIR filed an official request to the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the sheriff's office for law enforcement misconduct.
