Three Gilroy High School students will remain in Juvenile Hall
for now after being charged Wednesday in connection with a prank
death threat.
SAN JOSE –– Three Gilroy High School students will remain in Juvenile Hall for now after being charged Wednesday in connection with a prank death threat.
It is unknown how long the two girls and one boy will be held in custody. The charges prosecutors are pressing against all three include making terrorist threats, according to an official with the public defender’s office.
Gilroy police say one of the defendants, a girl masking her voice to sound like a male, called 9-1-1 Friday and told emergency dispatchers she had a gun, was at GHS and planned to shoot her cooking teacher. In fact, police said, the three 17-year-olds did not have any weapons and were calling from a stolen cell phone at a fast food eatery on First Street.
The prank, as Gilroy police described it, prompted heavily armed police to swarm the school and lock it down for nearly three hours Friday morning. They arrested the three students that afternoon.
On his way into the courthouse Wednesday morning, the stepfather of the girl who police say made the threatening call said he had visited his stepdaughter once since her arrest. She has been “doing all right” in juvenile hall, he said, and while she didn’t talk much about Friday’s incident, “she did say that she was just playing around.
“She told her mother she never thought it would come to this,” he said.
“They didn’t have any weapons,” he said. “They didn’t have any intention of doing harm to their teacher.”
The threat was a stupid thing to do, the stepfather said.
“They realize that now,” he said of the three friends.
This girl’s mother also attended the Wednesday court hearing but refused to comment. The other girl’s father attended as well but could not be reached for comment.
The arrested boy’s mother said he is doing “OK, I guess,” in custody. The incident has been hard on her family, she said.
This prank call was out of character for the three students, who normally don’t get in trouble, the boy’s mother said. She described her son as “remorseful” after seeing him in court Wednesday.
“It was a joke to them,” she said. “They didn’t intentionally mean to harm anybody.
“They just weren’t thinking right when they did something wrong.”
