IT LOOKS LIKE another student of Asian descent has run afoul of school authorities who find something he says “disturbing” in the wake of the Virginia Tech mass shooting by Seung-Hui Cho.

Allen Lee, an 18-year-old high-school student at Cary-Grove High School in Cary, Ill., was arrested near his home on April 23 after turning in a “violent” in-class writing assignment, the Associated Press reported.

In the days following the Virginia Tech shootings of April 16, there have been at least two other instances where Asian students have been singled out as potentially dangerous by school administrators or others.

Lee, who posted $75 bail, was charged with disorderly conduct for his essay, which he insisted was entirely a joke. “At the very last sentence, I said that this teacher’s method of teaching could lead to a school shooting,” Lee told the AP Wednesday.

District 155 spokesman Jeff Puma said that the phrases Lee used in the essay were disturbing and not easily construed as a joke, and that the actions the school took were entirely appropriate.

“The language in it was such that it really did seem that an assessment needed to be made,” Puma told TMM. “So it went from the teacher to the department chair to the principal and was related through a number of steps to involve the police, because they are experts on reading the intent of things like these.”

Puma told TMM that Lee’s race in no way played a part in the school’s decisions.

Lee’s arrest, however, comes after Virginia Tech student Wayne Chiang was mistakenly fingered by Internet hounds as the April 16 gunman, and after SUNY-Cobleskill student Tharindu Meepegama was suspended by his college and essentially forced to go to a mental-health facility for a psychiatric evaluation for posting a picture of himself with a shotgun.

A call to the Lee residence by TMM was not immediately returned, but Lee’s father earlier told the AP that he understood the atmosphere on school campuses after Virginia Tech, but stressed his son is a straight-A student and was doing what the teacher told him—using poetic conventions to express ideas.

Students at the school have begun a petition drive to let him back into school.

Lee is scheduled to appear in court June 18. •