A 15-year-old student could serve up to five years in prison for threatening to launch an attack on classmates at Yorktown High School, police said Wednesday. Detective with the Arlington County Police Department's Robbery-Homicide unit have charged the student with making anonymous and unspecified written statements to a female classmate indicating that he was planning an assault.
"We've certainly never had any incident in the past that has caused this level of interruption at the school," said Yorktown Principal Ray Pasi. "But, when you have a lot of young students together in any place, things like this can happen."
According to police, the threat came at around 11 p.m. Tuesday night via instant messenger to a 15-year-old female student's home computer. Her parents called the authorities. Police will not release the content of the message, though department spokesman Matt Martin said it does state others would come to bodily harm at Yorktown the following day. He added the message does not state how the attack was to be executed. Police searched the school at 2 a.m. the same night and found nothing. Yet about an hour after students arrived Wednesday morning, school officials told them to evacuate. Pasi said students were told they had to leave the building as part of a drill.
With the students outside, police conducted a sweep of the building with the help of 10 K-9 units brought by local law enforcement groups from jurisdictions like 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. Martin said nothing was found, but a further investigation at the school was able to identify the offending student, who was then arrested. The mass effort, Martin said, was coordinated by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. Arlington, he added, has an officer serving with that FBI unit.
"Anytime there's a chance that an explosive could be used, we have the ability to tap into that resource," Martin said. "I wouldn't call it standard procedure, but this kind of thing is not an everyday occurrence."
YORKTOWN STUDENTS were back in class by noon. The student who police say issued the threat came before a judge Thursday who ruled he will remain at the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Home until trial. The charge of issuing a written threat to kill is a class six felony and carries a $2,500 fine along with jail time.
Pasi said school security is well-managed for Yorktown's 1,600 students and there is no plan to tighten it in light of the incident.
National statistics from the Virginia Youth Violence Project, a research initiative at the University of Virginia, show a rapid decline in school shootings 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.