Juvenile charged with making school threat

A juvenile was taken into custody Friday after authorities say he made threats against a school.

According to Ohio County Sheriff Adam Wright, a mother called dispatch late last Thursday night after coming across a disturbing image on her son’s phone of an individual making a threat to possibly do harm to an unknown school.

“We didn’t know what school. We didn’t even know who the young man was,” Wright said. “The photo had been cropped to look as if the Ohio County Sheriff’s Office had sent it out that said ‘young boy threatens a local school.’ It made it look like it had come from our Facebook post.”

The photo was discovered to have been a post off of the social media site, Snapchat. Wright said the photo in question was of an arm with a black pistol that he believes was an airsoft pistol and had threatening remarks about a shooting “on Tuesday.”

The night-shift sergeant and a deputy notified Wright around 12:30 a.m. Friday to let him know about the incident. Wright said the deputies had narrowed it down to two students who went to two different schools. Between 5-6 a.m., officers made contact with the father of one of the students who said he had seen the photo which had been taken weeks prior.

“We discovered that this group of kids were doing this as a joke, however, because of the magnitude and what is going on in today’s world, we still took it very serious,” Wright said.

OCSO was able to make contact with the student early that morning and he was taken into custody and charged with terroristic threatening.

“Even though we knew early in the morning that the photo was weeks old, we still took it seriously because in today’s time you never know.

Wright said that no particular school was threatened and the threat was not for that particular school day. OSCO did notify the school system early that morning.

“(The post) said that ‘when you show up on Tuesday ...’ It wasn’t for that particular day.” Wright said.

Classes were held as scheduled Friday morning with extra police presence at the schools.

Wright said his office did not feel like there was an immediate threat and that he knows the school system would not place a child in danger.

“Based on our findings, the school board did not have reason to believe there was an imminent threat toward students and this matter was handled per their protocol,” Wright posted on social media Friday afternoon.