Tearful teen told detective he’d done no wrong

Dabbing at tears with his mother at his side, a 17-year-old boy accused of terrorizing schools and homes by calling in fake emergencies across North America told police on the day of his arrest that he didn’t do anything wrong and just wanted to go home.

“To be honest, I’m kind of scared and obviously hungry,” the boy told police in a videotaped statement to Ottawa police that was played at his trial on Monday afternoon.

“It’s scary. I’ve never been here before,” he told Det. Joel Demore in the 2014 statement.

The boy is accompanied by his mother, and they keep saying “no comment,” but the detective manages to keep the interview going for two hours, relaying hypothetical and homespun analogies directed at the accused’s mother.

The mother was steadfast that her son had done no wrong, but the detective wasn’t buying it.

The mother told the detective that she supervised her son’s home-schooling and held down a shift-work job for up to 80 hours a week. The detective pressed on: She worked shifts, monitored her son’s eight-hour schooling at home, and still had time to cook and clean? The detective rejected her claims and said her son had “spent way too much time alone by himself.”

The detective tried to dissect the mother’s story, saying the layout of her son’s bedroom — which he said he toured — didn’t fit her version of how she could possibly monitor her son’s online schooling when she couldn’t have seen the computer screen from her vantage point.

Then Demore quit mincing words, saying: “Bullsh-t!”

“You can call it whatever you want,” the boy’s mother fired back.

“I don’t even think you’ve ever been in his room,” the detective countered.

The boy, his identity shielded by law, is facing more than 30 criminal charges related to fake 911 calls — from bomb threats to murder — that terrorized people at schools and homes across North America.

Another Barrhaven boy alleged he was framed by the accused during the alleged online terror campaign, only to be wrongly arrested by police and held for eight hours at the Elgin Street headquarters. The boy was released after police confirmed that the unsuspecting boy’s email address had been spoofed to send death threats to his school.

The 17-year-old, who has pleaded not guilty, is being represented by defence lawyer Joshua Clarke in the trial before Ontario Court Justice Mitch Hoffman. The next main sitting in the trial is scheduled for February 2016.