Teen charged with making two bomb threats toward high school
A 15-year-old boy was charged this week in connection with two bomb threats targeting Oscar Smith High School in Chesapeake in late October.
The Chesapeake fire marshal’s office charged the teen, who is a former student at Oscar Smith and is currently enrolled at Southeastern Cooperative Educational Programs, with two misdemeanor counts of threatening to bomb as someone under the age of 15 and two felony counts of threatening death or bodily injury to persons on school property. The threats were made Oct. 25 and 26, the first of which prompted a lockdown and the second caused the building to be evacuated. School activity resumed both days, according to Capt. Steven Bradley with the Chesapeake Fire Department.
The threats came during a week last fall when multiple schools in the area were targeted with threats.
Bradley explained that the process to obtain records from whatever service provider is used to make the threats takes a lot of time, but it’s worth it to address these cases that can cause so much chaos in the community.
“It’s a long process, but it’s one that I think we would all agree is very necessary in terms of eliminating these threats, especially to schools,” Bradley said. “It’s such a nuisance really, in terms of its effect on the educational process, it’s a huge distraction.”
Investigators first have to establish probable cause that a specific phone number or IP address was used in the threat to justify a search warrant in order to get their hands on the records, which are sometimes pages and pages long Bradley said.
He said making a call from a private number isn’t enough to foil an investigation, but the difficulty of the investigation depends on the medium used to make the threat.
“We are asking parents to use this as an opportunity to talk with kids,” Bradley said in a news release. “They should understand that words have consequences whether communicated by text, email, or phone, and threats of this nature will be investigated thoroughly.”