A man arrested for calling in a bomb threat at an Alpharetta mall on Friday was granted a $41,000 bond on Saturday.
Alpharetta police arrested Omari Glenn Riden, 28, on Friday after police received two calls from the same person about a bomb threat Friday morning at North Point Mall.
Police said when Riden called to ask for an update on the bomb scare, they became suspicious that he was the same person who had called an hour earlier to report it.
The second call came as emergency officials were evacuating the shopping center.
“The caller called back to the 911 center and inquired about the progress,” police spokesman George Gordon said.
For nearly five hours police kept the mall empty as bomb squad members and bomb-sniffing dogs from police, the GBI, and FBI members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force scoured the facility looking for an explosive device.
None was found, Gordon said, characterizing the threat as a hoax.
The first call was received Friday at 9:30 a.m., about a half-hour before the mall opened.
Alpharetta police and the GBI went through a systematic evacuation process and began combing through the mall property.
Around 1 p.m., police took Riden into custody after tracking him down.
“During the interview with the detectives he began to cry and confessed to calling in the hoax bomb threat,” Gordon said of Riden.
Investigators “developed information to find him off the first call,” Gordon said. “The second call was icing on the cake because now they had two calls to compare to one another.”
It was the second major bomb threat this week in metro Atlanta.
On Tuesday, the Cobb County and Cherokee County courthouses were evacuated after police said a Marietta restaurant owner called in a threat against both facilities.
Such threats have garnered heightened attention from law enforcement officials in the weeks since a pair of pressure- cooker bombs placed near the end of the Boston Marathon killed three people on April 15.
Riden has theft, auto theft and drug arrests in Fulton and DeKalb counties dating back to 2006, jail records show.
Charges against him in the mall bomb threat are pending but could include felony “making terroristic threat” offenses, and possibly federal charges because the FBI was involved, Gordon said.
Riden is being held at the North Fulton Jail Annex in Alpharetta. His next court hearing is May 24.
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