New England Patriots receiver Julian Edelman was in Texas visiting his former teammate Danny Amendola late last month when he received a direct message on his Instagram account: “Dude, there is a kid in your comment section says he s going to shoot up a school, i think you should alert the authority.”

Edelman instantly thought of the mass shooting about five weeks earlier in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people were killed. “With the emotions of what happened, and I have a kid now, I said, holy Toledo, what is going on?” Edelman said in an interview this week.

He quickly notified his assistant in Boston, Shannen Moen, who looked through the hundreds of comments that followed Edelman’s most recent post on Instagram. She found the alarming message: “I’m going to shoot my school up watch the news.”

Moen called 911, and authorities were able to trace the message to an address in Port Huron, Michigan.

Police in Michigan immediately drove to the house where the threatening message originated. When the police arrived at the address, they found a 14-year old boy who, they said, admitted to posting the threat. They also found two rifles that belonged to his mother, according to Capt. Joseph Platzer of the Port Huron Police Department.

Platzer said the boy’s threat was aimed at the middle school that he attends in a nearby township. The boy was taken to a juvenile-detention center, where he remains. He was charged with making a false report of a threat of terrorism, a felony punishable by up to four years in jail.

The case was sent to the local district attorney’s office and the boy has had one court hearing.

Moen said she is relieved a potential crisis was averted. “When I told Julian, he was in shock,” Moen said. She said Edelman wanted to thank the person who sent him the direct message for his vigilance. (Someone with the Instagram handle jesseyi3.) Moen has reached out to that person but so far has received no response.

— The New York Times