Two Jackson County high schools and two Hall County middle schools have been evacuated in the past two days in response to fake threats made by students. These students now face charges for misleading first responders.
Jackson County and East Jackson comprehensive high schools were evacuated Wednesday after a 16-year-old girl called 911 to report an active shooter. The high school student has been charged with disrupting operations of a public school, transmitting a false public alarm, unlawful conduct during a 911 call and false report of a crime. All four are misdemeanors.
Georgia law mandates that people under age 17 be tried as juveniles, but there are exceptions for younger teens who commit felonies or violent crimes. No felony charges have yet been brought against these students.
Officers from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, four local police departments, the Georgia State Patrol, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Transportation’s Motor Carrier Compliance Division responded to the threat. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said her office has not yet determined how much responding to the incident cost.
In 2014, an anonymous shooter threat cost the University of Georgia Police Department more than $3,200 to evacuate and clear a campus building. The Jackson hoax call involves more buildings and more departments, so it likely had a more expensive response.
Morris "Mo" Wiltshire defended Ariel Omar Arias, the student who made the UGA threat. Arias posted anonymously on social media site Yik Yak that students should stay away from the Miller Learning Center "if you want to live" and threatened to show up at the building with an AK-47 assault rifle.
Arias pleaded guilty, reimbursed the police department and completed a pretrial diversion program that involved community service. He did not serve time in jail. Whiltshire said causing a false alarm on social media and calling 911 are very different crimes. Arias intended to be funny when he posted online and assumed it would only be read as a joke. He did not expect police to take it seriously or respond, an argument that can't be made for someone who calls 911, Whiltshire said.
“As a former prosecutor, that would matter to me,” he said. “We were able to get Arias into (the pretrial diversion program) because we could show he didn’t intend for the response to happen.”
At North Hall Middle School on Wednesday and at Gainesville Middle School on Thursday, bomb threats were found written on bathroom walls. The Hall County Sheriff's Office arrested a middle school student Wednesday for the threat at North Hall. An arrest has not yet been made regarding the Gainesville threat.
It is painful to see young people make life-altering mistakes, Wiltshire said, but these threats do too much harm to go unpunished.
“It’s dangerous for the responders. It’s dangerous for the public. It’s dangerous any time you have SWAT rushing anywhere,” he said.
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