Threats, both real and fake, against schools have spiked in Lawrence County this week and public officials have been quickly responded.
“We take every threat seriously,” Lawrence County Jeff Lawless said.
On Wednesday, his deputies arrested two students who made threats against their schools.
One was a 12-year-old female Dawson-Bryant Junior High School student who made threats online. She was arrested on charges of delinquency by terroristic threats and delinquency by inducing panic.
The second arrest was of a 16-year-old female Ironton High School student made a verbal threat to shoot up the school but had no weapons. She was arrested by a Lawrence County sheriff’s deputy who serves as the school resource officer at the school on a charge of delinquency by inducing panic.
Dawson-Bryant schools and were closed on Wednesday. Symmes Valley schools and Ironton schools were closed on Thursday.
“These threats disrupt schools, it worries parents, teachers and staff. It is a bad thing,” Lawless said. And the investigations into all the possible threats “is unbelievable. I have detectives working nonstop on this.”
Lawless pointed out that everything put on the internet can be tracked and that the State of Ohio has a Cybercrimes Unit that assists in these investigations.
“It is just a matter of how long it takes to track someone,” he said. “It can’t be hidden for very long anymore. There are dark web sites that they can bounce IP addresses off of, but eventually with some hard work these all get tied back together.”
The cases against the girls are now in the court system and will be prosecuted by Lawrence County Prosecutor Brigham Anderson’s office.
The juveniles are facing first-degree and second-degree felony charges in these cases, which means the offenses are the same as if they were adults although juveniles face different penalties and are not sent to adult prison.
“However, the sentencing structure is quite different,” Anderson said. “For juveniles, it is a commitment to the Ohio Department of Youth Services.”
If found guilty of either charge, the sentence is in range between six months to until the offender turns 21 years of age.
“The way it works is they are sentenced to a minimum of six months in the custody of Department of Youth Services and a maximum term to age 21,” Anderson said. “The Department of Youth Services will determine between the six months and age 21, first, when you are released and two, if you are released, what the terms of the release will be. So, it is quite different in the juvenile system than it is in the adult system.”
This isn’t the first time that the office has dealt with school threat cases. In 2022, there was a spate of similar cases.
Anderson said in the last case his office prosecuted, the student was found guilty of terroristic threatening and got a sentence of six months to age 21 with Department of Youth Services.
Because juvenile criminal records are sealed, Anderson doesn’t know how long the student served.
“It is not public record,” he said. “I don’t even have access to that information.”
While the thought of a 12-year-old spending nine years in a youth facility is scary, Anderson said that parents and children “need to be aware that this is a very serious matter. This is not something to be taken lightly. They are terrorizing our community, they are disrupting the schools and causing great panic among school administrators, teachers, kids and we are taking this very seriously.”