Circleville student arrested over threat

A Pickaway County juvenile-court judge ordered Friday that a 14-year-old Circleville High School student remain in custody on a delinquency charge of inducing panic that alleges he made threats about the school.

Holt Imler is accused of writing inside a textbook that there would be some kind of shooting at the high school Friday, Assistant Pickaway County Prosecutor Tony Chamberlain said. Someone reported the threat to the high school principal about 3:30 p.m. Thursday, and within a couple of hours, Imler had been identified as the suspect and arrested, said district spokesman Evan Debo.

Imler is being held in a juvenile-detention facility in Lancaster, Chamberlain said.

Circleville’s schools had a heavy police presence Friday, but otherwise it was mostly business as usual in the district, Debo said. Officers and police-dog units searched the entire campus prior to the arrival of students.

“Every square inch of our real estate has been gone through,” he said.

Debo said that after the shooting at Parkland, Florida, in February, the district sent home information with parents reminding them of safety measures already in place in the schools and informing them about additional steps being taken.

“We’ve been meeting with law enforcement almost daily,” he said. “We are fortunate that everything was handled so quickly, with an arrest coming in less than two hours.”