For the second time in May, an Arlington student was arrested for threatening to launch an attack against classmates in a local public school. The 13-year-old boy from Swanson Middle School was charged May 24 with making a written threat via Instant Messenger to kill students at Washington-Lee High School. His 15-year-old sister received the threat Monday night from someone using a screen name she did not recognize, according to police reports.
"In this day and age, we must treat any threat of violence against students or schools as real until proven otherwise," said Police Chief Doug Scott. "And even if they end up being a hoax, these threats disrupt the school day and divert vital public safety resources away from real needs. We have to find some way of letting our kids know that making violent threats, even if meant as a prank, will result in severe consequences."
Washington Lee was put under a lock down last Tuesday and a squad of 20 police officers combed the school in search of weapons or any evidence of a planned attack. Nothing was found. According to police department spokesman Matt Martin, two other students reported getting similar threats through the Internet from someone using the same screen name. The boy was identified, Martin said, by detectives in the police department's computer forensics unit who managed to track the boy's movements on-line.
MARTIN ADDED that the incident is not related to the evacuation of Yorktown High School May 18. A 15-year old student was arrested that day for making similar threats, also through Instant Messenger.
With the students outside the school, police conducted a sweep of the building with the help of 10 K-9 units brought by local law enforcement groups from jurisdictions including Alexandria, Prince George's County, Md., and Washington, D.C. The county Fire Department's bomb squad was on hand and military police from Fort Myer also lent a dog unit to the search. The mass effort was coordinated by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. A judge denied that student bail the following day, according to Martin, and he remains in the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Home pending a trial in juvenile court. The student from Swanson Middle School, Martin said, will be tried. Making a written threat to kill is a class 6 felony offense, punishable by up to five years in prison and $2,500 fine. The 13-year-old is also accused of harassment by computer, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 12 months in jail and a fine of $2,500.
National statistics from the Virginia Youth Violence Project, a research initiative at the University of Virginia, show a rapid decline in school homicides since 1992. Its most recent report states that, although highly publicized, attacks like the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School are rare. Based on the 93 incidents that occurred in the nation's 119,000 schools over a nine-year period from 1992 to 2002, it continues, the annual probability of a school experiencing a student-perpetrated homicide is about 1 in 11,520.
A joint study by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Education released in Nov. 2004 showed similar results. It states that the rate of violent crimes in school settings against students ages 12 to 18 dropped by half in last decade.