Three AG students charged in connection with bomb threats
State police in Uniontown have filed charges against three Albert Gallatin Area High School students in connection with three separate phony bomb threats at the school, and a fourth incident remains under investigation. The school district administration has expelled “at least three” students for one year for their involvement in the threats.
Charges of terroristic threats and causing or risking a catastrophe were filed Thursday against the three juveniles in the Fayette County Juvenile Probation office.
A 14-year-old male student was charged with allegedly writing a bomb threat in the boys’ bathroom in hallway C on April 1.
Trooper James A. Pierce said the note stated, “There is a bomb in the school. If you don’t send everybody home, they will all die.”
After writing the note, the boy told a vice principal that he discovered the note. In his written confession, he told police he wrote the note because he wanted to go home, Pierce said.
He said a 16-year-old 10th-grade student allegedly hung a note in stair tower C on March 12, stating that a bomb had been placed in the building.
Handwriting analysis conducted by the State Police Regional Lab in Harrisburg indicated that the 16-year-old wrote the note, Pierce said.
A 16-year-old girl in the ninth grade was charged with a March 19 incident in which she allegedly placed a written bomb threat in a girls bathroom in hallway A on the second floor.
Pierce said a threat that was called in to the county 911 center on Sunday, March 23, indicating that a bomb would go off at 8 a.m. Monday, March 24, remains under investigation.
Masontown police charged a 15-year-old male student at Albert Gallatin North Middle School with terroristic threats and disorderly conduct for allegedly making a bomb threat at that school March 24.
School officials reported finding several notes stating that a bomb was in the building that morning.
“Hopefully, that’s the last of them,” Pierce said Friday.
In each incident, except the April 1 case when the suspect was quickly identified, the schools were evacuated or closed while police and firefighters searched and cleared them.
Although all the threats were hoaxes, school officials took them seriously.
“Our intent was to follow through with the fullest extent of what the discipline policy allowed,” Superintendent Walter Vicinelly said Friday, noting that he had not yet been informed that police charged the students.
He said safety of all students and staff was the district’s top priority in each of the incident.
The district’s crisis plan was put into effect when the threats became known.
Vicinelly such threats not only endanger students and employees, but disrupt education and require response from police, firefighters and bomb-detection dogs.
“Those responsible will be held accountable. We take this very seriously, and we follow through,” Vicinelly said.
After the one-year expulsions, he said, administrators will review the students’ records before deciding on their proper placement. Their return to district schools is not automatic, he said.
In a separate incident in October 2002, a Charlotte, N.C., man allegedly called the Fayette 911 center and said a bomb was in the high school. State police in Waynesburg charged Kenneth Paul Gould, 65, with making that call from a phone at the Masontown Shop N Save.
They charged him with making 10 bomb threats to a number of schools and businesses in Fayette and Greene counties. One threat was made to the Hatfield’s Perry Power Plant, police said. He was ordered held for count on a total of 30 charges at a preliminary hearing and is awaiting trail in Greene County.