Lenox — A 14-year-old student at Lenox Memorial Middle and High School has been arrested and charged on three felony counts of making what police allege were false bomb threats to the official school voicemail last Thursday (April 2) morning, according to the Berkshire District Attorney’s office. Officials regarded the call as serious enough that both the middle and high schools were evacuated.
More phone threats were made again on Monday (April 6), forcing students briefly out of the building, said Lenox Schools Superintendent Timothy Lee.
The student, who was not named because he is a juvenile, also faces three misdemeanor charges of “disturbing a school assembly,” according to the Berkshire District Attorney’s office. The student was scheduled to be arraigned on Tuesday (April 7) in Berkshire Juvenile Court in Pittsfield, but according to the DA’s office, the results of the arraignment cannot be made public.
The school had to be evacuated and dismissed last Thursday as a result of the phoned in threat on a day when the second and seventh grades were to take the MCAS test, according to a student who did not wish to be identified, and also the school website. It is still unclear whether this was a motive behind the incident.
Lenox Police Chief Stephen O’Brien told another newspaper that Lenox Police and members of the Berkshire Task Force’s Digital Forensic Evidence Unit had a search warrant for a “local residence,” and seized property there at 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday, April 7, leading to the arrest. O’Brien would not say what had been taken from the house, however, and he did not return calls or emails this week to confirm that evidence had, indeed, been removed.
According to Lenox Superintendent Timothy Lee, the school’s technology coordinator “worked hard and worked well” with Lenox Police to “open up some avenues for police to be able to investigate some other things.”
Last Thursday’s threats, “long, angry, more specific and probably more disturbing,” Lee said, were somewhat in contrast to the milder threats received on Monday. School officials believed both threats were made by the same caller.
Nothing suspicious was found at the school on either Thursday or Monday, and classes promptly resumed after a fire drill-style exit of the school’s 410 students to the soccer field while “firefighters and administrative staff made a visual search inside,” Lee said.
Aside from the legal ramifications for the student who allegedly made the threats, Superintendent Lee told The Edge that while he was unable to “expand” on the potential school-related consequences for the student, he said the range was “pretty wide…from in-school suspension or loss of privileges to expulsion.”
While the evidence was enough to make an arrest, police and school officials say they welcome more information from the public provided either to the school or police. Police say the investigation is ongoing.
