A high school student in Summerville, South Carolina, was reportedly suspended from school and detained by police because of a school assignment in which he wrote he was going to shoot a dinosaur.

Alex Stone, a 16-year-old student at Summerville High School, said he was asked by his teacher to write a series of mock Facebook statuses as part of a class exercise, CBS-affiliated WCSC reported.

“I killed my neighbor’s pet dinosaur, and, then, in the next status I said I bought the gun to take care of the business,” Alex told the station.

The boy’s teacher contacted school officials Tuesday after seeing the message containing the words “gun” and “take care of business,” the station reported.

Summerville police were called and students were locked down in their classrooms while officers conducted a search of the teen’s locker and backpack. No weapon was ever found, police said.

An incident report said officers placed the “irate” student in handcuffs and arrested him for disturbing schools, The Post and Courier reported. He was later released into his mother’s care, police said.

“I mean, first of all, we don’t have dinosaurs anymore,” the teen’s mother, Karen Gray, told WCSC. “Second of all, he’s not even old enough to buy a gun.”

District officials said the student has been suspended, the station reported. Ms. Gray said her son was suspended for a week.

“I regret it because they put it on my record, but I don’t see the harm in it,” Alex told WCSC. “I think there might have been a better way of putting it, but I think me writing like that, it shouldn’t matter unless I put it out towards a person.”

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