Seventh-Grader Charged With Making Bomb Threats
A 12-year-old girl in Chester County has been charged with making two bomb threats at Kennett Middle School earlier this year.
Police in New Garden say the student, a seventh grader, went to school administrators on September 30th reporting a threatening word written on a bathroom wall. Cops treated it as a non-specific threat (“best described as an alarming word or phrase with no specific detail,” per police). A search of the school turned up no explosives.
Cops were called again to Kennett Middle School on October 10th to deal with another nonspecific threat. School administrators say the same student alerted them to the threat in the same bathroom both times. “The administrator questioned the student’s veracity and they subsequently confessed to writing both the word and the phrase which indicated a bomb threat,” New Garden police wrote in a Facebook post. “Subsequent to an administrative search conducted by the school official, the writing instrument was recovered from the student.”
Police did not release any information about the student other than her age and grade, but the Daily Local reports the student was a girl.
The student, 12, has been charged with two counts each of terroristic threats, threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction and institutional vandalism. Police say nonspecific threats at Kennett Middle School also happened last school year — there was on April 8th of this year — and they’ve facilitated a meeting between the FBI and school officials.
The student, who is in custody of her parents and banned from the middle school, is being charged as a juvenile.