A teenage student from California was allegedly arrested over an Instagram post in which he threatened a ‘massacre’ at his former high school, police said.

The incident took place in Montebello, just outside of Los Angeles late Friday night. The threat was reported to the police by a student’s mom, who said that her son received an Instagram message from a person who said he "was going to take a gun and start a massacre" at Montebello High School on Monday, March 2, as per a police report.

According to the police, Devin Harper, the 18-year-old suspect was expelled from the school around 2 years ago, as he was involved in a similar sort of situation. Even at that time, he had posted similar types of threats on social media platforms.

The police said that when Harper was confronted by them for posting such threats, he had allegedly denied performing such an act. Further, when the authorities asked him to pull up the post, "he told the officers that he was unable to access it," the police department said. Harper was later arrested and charged with criminal threats, according to the authorities.

Although it wasn’t clear if he had an attorney or not, he was to appear in court on Tuesday. The school police officers were dispatched to campus on Monday, "out of an abundance of caution," Principal Horacio Perez said. The classes at the Montebello High School operated normally throughout the day.

“These matters are taken very seriously. Our administration is in contact with Montebello Police, school police, and [the] district office," Perez said in a statement.

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