"I wonder how many similar stories there are out there and how they were handled."
In-school suspension and police interrogation for me on different occasions. In each, I had actually done nothing but was smart and could have done something. The first was actually a setup by the most notorious hacker in the school who I was showing up a bit with my demos. He had some script downloading and popping up porn on my computer that a teacher saw while I was at lunch. Looking at the times, it added new files to IE cache every 15-30 minutes all the way into the 2-3AM's. My defense was I couldn't possibly be in class surfing porn after the school closed. The non-technical authorities had made up their mind someone would be punished, though. ;)
In each, I had actually done nothing but was smart and could have done something.
I had the experience in high school in the 90's of being wrongly accused of computer mischief solely on the grounds that I might be capable of such. I was astounded that merely possessing knowledge would be sufficient for such an accusation. Thankfully, no suspensions or police involvement came out of it.
This happened to me in highschool in the 90s too. There were several Mac laptops available for students to check out of the library, on one occasion someone changed all the desktop icons on one of them to little piles of shit. I was an immediate suspect because I brought my own laptop to school and people had seen me using a terminal. For some reason they didn't think to look at the list of people who had actually checked out the "hacked" laptop, which obviously didn't include me. My fate was sealed when they asked to see my school-issued floppy disk and found a picture of a mushroom cloud on it (part of a hypercard presentation on environmental destruction). I ended up getting a 3 day suspension and being barred from using the school laptops that I had never used anyway.
In the police case, I got questioned a while. They figured out it was bullshit. Told me to watch what I say. (Never got hood at hiding opinions or skill lol...) Cop then just bought me a drink and hung out with me until next class. Got a bit lucky there. :)
Good times they were not, though. As a kid who didn't have bad intentions, dealing with the repercussions was a lot.
There was no precedent (at my school, at that time) for how to prevent and deal with a situation like that, though.