A teen in Indiana is facing felony intimidation charges over a water gun

Gun rights commentator Liberty Doll says a case out of Indiana has turned a goofy high school tradition into something far more serious, with an 18-year-old now facing a felony charge over what she argues looks, at least from the public record so far, like a major overreaction.

In her report, Liberty Doll said Adrien Williams, a high school senior in Portage, was playing the annual game known as Senior Assassin, where students try to eliminate classmates with water guns. Instead of scoring a point, she said, Williams ended up surrounded by police, jailed for three nights, and charged with felony intimidation.

The basic facts are not hard to understand. Williams waited outside a Planet Fitness with a water gun, apparently hoping to spray a classmate. People nearby saw what they thought was a real handgun, called 911, and described what sounded like an active shooter scenario.

From there, everything escalated fast.

A Senior Prank Turned Into A Full Police Response

Liberty Doll explained that Senior Assassin is a common last-man-standing game among high school seniors. Students use water guns, stalk assigned targets, and try to get them out before they get tagged themselves.

She noted that these games are usually meant to be harmless fun, even if they sometimes lead to real-world trouble when bystanders mistake toy guns for real firearms. In her view, that risk gets even worse when students lurk in parking lots, wait outside buildings, or use toys that do not look obviously fake.

That is where Williams, she said, made a very bad decision.

According to Liberty Doll, the teenager bought a water gun from TikTok and posted up outside Planet Fitness to wait for his target. Callers reportedly told 911 that he was hiding himself, pulling a gun in and out of his pocket, and at one point even going inside the gym with it.

Police responded as if the threat was real. Liberty Doll said 10 on-duty Portage officers, two off-duty officers, and one Porter County sheriff’s deputy rushed to the scene.

By the time they reached Williams, he was sitting in his car with the toy gun visible inside.

Why The Police Say They Treated It As Real

Liberty Doll walked through the official police version in detail. The Portage Police Department said officers believed they were responding to an imminent active shooter situation, especially because the call came during school hours.

The department also said the descriptions from 911 callers were alarming. The suspect was described as nervous, peeking around corners, waiting for someone to come out, and carrying what appeared to be a gray handgun with an extended magazine.

Officers later said the water gun looked real enough that one of them did not realize it was fake until he was within just a few feet of the vehicle.

Liberty Doll did not dismiss that concern. In fact, she said outright that using a realistic-looking black toy gun in a public place was “absolutely” a bad idea. If someone is creeping around a business with something that looks like a pistol, she said, people are going to panic.

That part of her analysis was pretty measured. She was not pretending the teen did nothing wrong. Her argument was narrower and sharper: a bad idea is not automatically the same thing as a felony.

The Charge Is Where Liberty Doll Sees A Major Problem

After Williams was detained, police said he spontaneously told them he was playing Senior Assassin. But that did not stop the arrest.

Liberty Doll said a patrol supervisor contacted the Porter County Prosecutor’s Office, and a deputy prosecutor authorized a charge of felony intimidation. Williams was then taken to jail.

This is where her report really dug in. She read through Indiana’s intimidation law and argued that the public facts released so far do not obviously support a felony charge.

She pointed out that the law requires a communicated threat, and as far as the public has been told, Williams never actually threatened anyone. He did not, according to the available reports she cited, verbally threaten a person, target a witness, target a judge, use a real deadly weapon, or communicate terrorism in the usual sense spelled out in the statute.

She acknowledged that prosecutors might try to fit the facts into a theory that his actions interfered with the occupancy of a building or caused reasonable fear. But even there, Liberty Doll argued, the statute seems to point more naturally toward a misdemeanor than a felony.

That is the part of the story that feels especially shaky. The police may have had every reason to respond hard and fast in the moment. But once the scene was secured and the gun turned out to be a water toy, the legal logic for a felony charge becomes much harder to follow from the outside.

What Makes The Case Feel So Extreme

Liberty Doll said Williams had no criminal record, was a football star, and had a college scholarship that could now be at risk. She also said he spent three nights in jail, which gives the case a weight that goes far beyond a teenage mistake.

She seemed genuinely stunned that he was not shot during the encounter. According to her, once Williams saw police pointing guns at him, he started yelling that it was a water gun and that he was part of the game.

That detail matters because it turns this from a dumb prank story into something much more serious. A toy mistaken for a real gun can get someone killed in seconds. Liberty Doll made that point without sugarcoating it.

At the same time, she clearly believes the charge went too far. She suggested that unless major facts have been left out of the police statements and press coverage, this looks more like an overreaction than a well-matched felony case.

That is probably the strongest way to frame it. There may be enough here for school discipline, parental outrage, or even some lesser charge depending on how prosecutors read the law. But a felony intimidation count over a water gun in a senior game raises a lot of obvious questions.

Even The Business Did Not Seem To React Like It Was A Threat

One of the more interesting details Liberty Doll mentioned was that Williams reportedly went into Planet Fitness and asked if he could wait inside for his target. Staff told him no and sent him back outside.

She used that point to argue that even the business itself did not initially respond as if he were an active shooter or immediate violent threat.

That does not erase what later callers thought they saw. But it does complicate the picture. If he walked in openly enough to ask permission and was simply told to leave, that cuts against the idea that he was aggressively threatening the place.

Liberty Doll also noted that Indiana brandishing law would not cleanly fit either, because that typically requires a real loaded gun pointed at someone. Here, the object was fake, and the known reports do not say he pointed it at a person in a threatening way.

So the case starts to look like a legal square peg being hammered into a felony-shaped hole.

Liberty Doll’s Bottom Line

Liberty Doll did not present Williams as blameless. She said plainly that using a realistic-looking toy pistol in public was reckless and bound to cause a scare.

But she also made clear that the charge, as currently explained, does not seem to match the conduct. In her telling, the more likely explanation is either that key facts have not been released yet or that police and prosecutors took a situation that was already embarrassing and escalated it far beyond what was reasonable.

That is why this story stands out. It is not just about a teenager making a foolish call in a parking lot. It is about what happens after the panic fades and the system has to decide whether it is dealing with a dangerous criminal act or a stupid senior stunt that spun wildly out of control.

Right now, based on Liberty Doll’s reading of the law and the facts released so far, that distinction looks very much unsettled. And for one Indiana teen, the difference could shape the rest of his future.