Mixing ammonia and bleach is actually quite dangerous, and regularly warned against in most chemistry classes. Calling this an "experiment" is generous at best.
That's interesting I assumed either baking soda and vinegar or soda and some mentos or the classic yet much more hazardous drain cleaner and aluminum foil. I assumed that with the "war on some drugs" and just being practical, that they were not talking about iodine and ammonia. And if it involved flame like the classic "flour dust in the air" emulation of a grain elevator having a bad day, they would have freaked out about possession of the lighter. And if it was the classic "just stuff some dry ice in a bottle and run" they wouldn't have talked about mixing stuff because its just one thing. Maybe the old alka-seltzer tablet in water trick. The point being that there's about 100 ways to make a mostly harmless little chemical firework. Add a thin layer of theater to pretend that folks don't know this and its not all over the internet and if we just pretend not to talk about it, it'll never happen, just like the same morons think works with respect to homosexuality, or premarital straight sex, or atheism, or any number of topics that some morons often don't like.
There's really two issues. The first is the hard core fascist way of thinking where anything not compulsory is forbidden and anything not forbidden is compulsory, so her mistake was doing anything on school grounds with even a minute quantity of creativity. School is the place where human spirit is intentionally by design ground down, turn them into uncreative uneducated automatons so they can appreciate tightening bolts on the factory assembly line for 12 hours a day. Oh wait that's been obsolete for decades. Oh well who cares there's money to be made doing it and metric goals to achieve and tests to teach to.
The second failure mode is its really pretty stupid, just generally speaking, to randomly mix stuff together, and randomly screwing around mixing stuff isn't chemistry, so lets be honest about what really happened, she read about how to blow stuff up in a fun mostly harmless manner and thought it would be fun to try at school, and it worked and was safe, but she got caught. Its mostly harmless so rather than convicting her of some kind of terrorism felony they showed some mercy (or the police properly and rightly told the school to F off) so her story is being rewritten with lots of randomness added. There may be some interaction with profound ignorance of chemistry on all sides of the story from the kid on up.
I'm waiting to hear what she really mixed. If it was baking soda and vinegar this is ridiculous. If it was a strong acid and aluminum or bleach and ammonia, I could maybe understand this level of reaction.
They won't need to show mens rea (criminal intent) because it will never go to trial. They'll beat her over the head with the potential of a felony conviction until she agrees to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge. It would be great to see a decent defense lawyer pick this case up and take it to trial.
Last line in the article since it has been updated: "We've also obtained the police report from the incident. It shows that Wilmot was mixing toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum foil."
