The District Attorney’s office filed charges Monday against
three 17-year-old Gilroy High School students arrested in
connection with a death threat on one of their teachers.
GILROY –– The District Attorney’s office filed charges Monday against three 17-year-old Gilroy High School students arrested in connection with a death threat on one of their teachers.
The two girls and one boy were scheduled for a juvenile detention hearing this morning in San Jose, according to Deputy District Attorney Kurt Kumli, in charge of prosecuting juveniles in Santa Clara County.
The three have been in the county’s Juvenile Hall since Friday afternoon, Kumli said. Police, prosecutors and court officials are withholding the students’ names because they are minors. Kumli also withheld the charges against the students since they do not fall into the category of “serious or violent” offenses by juveniles that require disclosure under state law.
Police took the three teenagers to Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall in San Jose on Friday and booked them on suspicion of making terrorist threats, possession of stolen property – both felonies – and misuse of the 9-1-1 system. One of the girls is a sophomore; the other girl and the boy are juniors.
Two sets of police detectives, working separately, tracked a stolen cell phone to a home on the 800 block of Welburn Avenue. There they found the three GHS students shortly after 3 p.m. Friday. The boy lives there with his family.
Police say one of the three students placed the 9-1-1 calls that launched the police lockdown at GHS Friday morning, but to be sure, one of the officers dialed the number for the cell phone used in the death threats.
They immediately heard a ring from a bedroom. The phone – stolen that morning and used in the threat minutes later – was under the bed.
The officers arrested all three immediately, but because they all are minors, did not release their names.
No weapons of any kind were found in connection with the arrested teenagers. Based on interviews with the students after their arrest, police Capt. Scot Smithee and Sgt. John Sheedy said the death threat turned out to be only a “prank.”
“All three were involved,” Sheedy said, but only one actually called 9-1-1 and threatened to “bust a cap” on cooking teacher Diana Burkholder.
This person sounded like a male on the phone, but Sheedy said it was actually one of the girls masking her voice to sound like a man.
According to the arrested boy’s mother, her son said he wasn’t playing along with the prank.
“But still, he shouldn’t have been there,” she said. “I told him, ‘You should’ve just left. You should’ve just walked away.'”
In a chronology outlined by Sheedy, the three teens’ escapade began shortly after they got to school Friday morning. Instead of going to class, they went outside and flagged down a passing vehicle at the corner of Tenth Street and Orchard Drive.
They asked the male driver to take them to McDonald’s at First Street and Wren Avenue, which he did. When they exited the vehicle, one of the students stole the cellular phone from the car’s console. The owner reported it stolen to police shortly afterward at 9:15 a.m.
Meanwhile, the trio walked from McDonald’s to nearby Wienerschnitzel, where one of the girls used the stolen phone to call 9-1-1 at 9:29 a.m.
Like all 9-1-1 calls from cell phones in Gilroy, it was answered by a California Highway Patrol dispatcher. The girl, sounding like a male, told the dispatcher she had a gun, she was at GHS and she planned to shoot Burkholder.
After hanging up, the girl called back. This time, the CHP dispatcher transferred her to a Gilroy police dispatcher, and she repeated the threat.
The girl said she was at GHS with a gun. Fearing a massacre like at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, heavily armed police officers stormed the school within minutes and kept it locked down for nearly three hours.
When they didn’t find a gunman, they switched into investigative mode.
A couple of early leads came up empty.
Burkholder named one of her students she thought possibly capable of making the threat, but after police detained and questioned the boy, they determined he had nothing to do with the incident and let him go, Sheedy said.
Then they found that the last call made on the stolen phone before the 9-1-1 was to a Ronan Avenue address, but no one was home there, according to Assistant Police Chief Lanny Brown.
“I would like to call that good old-fashioned police work, but we didn’t have cell phones in the old days,” Sheedy said.
Gilroy police had not yet added up the cost of this operation as of Monday afternoon, but they say they will do everything possible to force the students’ families to repay it and will encourage the California Highway Patrol, Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office and Gilroy Unified School District to do the same.
The lockdown involved more than 30 police officers, a CHP helicopter from Napa and CHP airplane from Paso Robles.
The arrested boy’s mother said she does not think she can afford to pay this amount. They rent their house and already are worried about being evicted, she said.
Peter Crowley covers crime and other public safety matters for The Gilroy Dispatch. He can be reached at
pe****@gi************.com
.
