Police and prosecutors near Pittsburgh are expected to decide today whether to press charges against a fifth-grader after he allegedly posted a Death Note-inspired note in his elementary school containing the names of five or six students. The boy has been suspended.

“After conducting the investigation, we found it is based on the anime Death Note," Burrell School District superintendent Shannon Wagner said in a statement to WPXI News.

In Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s hit manga turned anime and live-action movie franchise, a high school student sets out to rid the world of evil using a supernatural notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it.

The incident at Stewart Elementary School quickly follows a similar one late last month in Shelby, Kentucky, where a "death note" was discovered at East Middle School containing the names of students and staff. While officials there aren't taking the situation lightly, they don't believe anyone is actually in danger.

"We did ask him [the student] if there's anyone that would want to hurt you or has anyone threatened you," Superintendent James Neihof told WLKY. "He did have some concerns with a few names and it really concerned us." The student has undergone a mental-health assessment, and Neihof says they're considering moving kids whose names were on the list out of the classes they share with the writer.

There was a period between 2008 and 2010 or so when these "death note" scares occurred with some frequency in the United States  -- an attempt to ban the manga in Albuquerque Public Schools failed in 2010 -- but they've died down in recent years.

(via Anime News Network)