Police after making an arrest in Brooklyn {Uvalde Police Facebook page}
A teen boy who made false active shooter threats to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and Coral Springs High School in January has been arrested, Coral Springs Police Chief Brad Mock said Wednesday.
The teen’s arrest in Brooklyn, New York, followed a three-month investigation involving over fourteen criminal justice agencies across the U.S., including police in Uvalde, Texas, New York City, and Broward County.
A short time after MSD and CSHS were threatened by phone, Uvalde received a series of threats, including multiple “swatting” calls targeting Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, according to Mock and Uvalde Police.
The same teen was responsible for the Coral Springs and Uvalde threats as well as threats made against schools in San Antonio, Texas, police said. The boy confessed to the crimes, according to Mock and Uvalde Police.
Both the Broward and Uvalde school districts have been targeted in mass shootings: the MSD attack that killed 17 people in February 2018, and the mass shooting in Uvalde in May 2022, where an 18-year-old former student at Robb Elementary School fatally shot 19 students and two teachers.
The name of the teen accused of making the false threats to schools was not made public Wednesday.
In addition to school shooting threats made by phone, he also allegedly made threats on Instagram, directed TikTok messages to a family member of a Robb Elementary School victim, and sent other threats to Uvalde students through various social media platforms, Uvalde Police said.
At Wednesday’s Coral Springs Commission meeting, Mock said police had assembled the department’s Threat Management Unit after the January calls targeting MSD and CSHS and “were able to identify the suspect going through the computer to make these calls out of Brooklyn, New York.”
“In the meantime, Uvalde, Texas, got the exact same call and multiple social media posts on their end,” said Mock. “So while we were working with law enforcement partners … they were able to get to Brooklyn to arrest the suspect, and they got full confessions for all those incidents.”
According to Uvalde Police, similar swatting calls were made to school campuses in San Antonio just minutes after the initial threats to Uvalde.
Texas authorities soon traveled to Brooklyn to further investigate. Based on their interview with the suspected swatter, the teen was taken into custody at his home in Brooklyn Thursday morning on one felony count of making a terroristic threat and four misdemeanor counts of falsely reporting an emergency, police said.
The boy admitted to making multiple swatting calls to Uvalde, San Antonio, Coral Springs, and Parkland, according to police.
The suspect also allegedly confessed to sending multiple social media threats, researching active shooter incidents, and monitoring law enforcement and Uvalde student social media accounts, police said.
A search of the teen’s residence confirmed that he had no access to weapons and no direct connection to Uvalde, San Antonio, or Florida, police said.
Mock said of Coral Springs Police investigators: “How fast they came together to actually identify a suspect through a computer is unbelievable, and it’s a reminder that you cannot hide. We will find you.”
“This is a reminder to anyone out there looking to do this: We take this very seriously, and all of our efforts will be there,” he said.
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