City teens charged with making threats

Unrelated incidents discovered through social media, police say

Two teenagers are facing charges after two separate allegations of making threats.

Staff Sgt. Regan James would not get into the specifics of the threats Tuesday, but said both involved hurting a number of people.

Edmonton police say the first incident happened on Dec. 13, when a 15-year-old boy allegedly sent a threatening text to another person.

The text was then reported to police.

The second incident followed the next night, when a threatening message was posted on an Internet chat room. The post was allegedly written by a 16-year-old boy in Edmonton.

One of the boys is a student at St. Joseph Composite High School while the other is a student at Archbishop Oscar Romero High School, said Lori Nagy, spokeswoman for the Catholic school board.

“These kind of incidents are taken extremely seriously and we are very grateful for the assistance of the Edmonton police as they identified the two teens, at the two different schools,” Nagy said Tuesday.

“I think this is just a really good reminder for anyone on social media, that even though they feel they are anonymous they will be identified and will be charged.”

Neither student will be returning to classes before schools close for the Christmas holidays, Nagy said. She couldn’t discuss whether they were facing suspension, citing privacy concerns.

Police first learned of the post when someone reported it via eps.net. They were later contacted by the FBI about the same threat.

James said the FBI was involved because the site where the threat was posted is international.

However, he said it was not Facebook or Twitter.

There was about a six-hour turnaround between when police were made aware of the post and when they were able to identify the individual’s IP address and make an arrest, James said at a news conference.

“I think there certainly is an amount of surprise when an individual posts something on the Internet and then suddenly the police are knocking at their door,” he said.

Police deal with a number of threats via social media every year, but this was somewhat different, James said.

“We don’t typically get involved or find complaints related to a mass number of people,” he said.

“Typically they’re involving domestic violence or one individual threatening another individual. So this is a very unique situation that’s occurred here. We don’t see this very often.”

The public must take responsibility watching what happens on social media, James said.

“We’re obviously in charge of monitoring our own social media. We as the police monitor this, but we leave it to the public, really, at large to monitor and officiate their own public chats. And that’s what happened in this case.”

Nagy said the school board reviews its security policies after incidents such as this one. “Any time we have any incidents, of course, we review our security crisis plan and look at any different ways we can to keep students safe,” she said.

Nagy said both schools will post a notice about the incidents on their websites Wednesday morning.

Both teens — who do not know each other — have been charged with uttering threats dangerous to the public, and police say both have been remanded in custody “for evaluation.”

The teens are both slated to appear in court on Dec. 21.