HAMBURG (WBEN) - A 16-year-old student has been charged in connection to Monday's threat at Frontier High School.
"This whole process basically started with an email yesterday at 8:30 a.m.," said Frontier Superintendent Richard Hughes. "The email mentioned that within an hour there was going to be a shooting."
Hughes says that the alleged perpetrator used another student's email address to send the initial message because it was quite clear that the student originally in question had no idea what was going on. A short time later, another message appeared, this time from a different email address.
"We worried that that our email system may have been hacked," said Hughes. "As you've seen across the state and the country, for that matter, there have been a number of malware and other kinds of attacks on school districts, so we thought maybe this was part of that."
The school then changed its email system and all of the student accounts were reset, and this caused a response via a third separate email account. This told school officials that it was most likely a student inside of the building. When the third email was received, the school was instructed to go to a hold-in-place, which restricted the movement of students within the classroom. During that time, a few other emails were sent, each of which was taunting in nature and one that said "you haven't found me yet."
From there, Frontier went into full lockdown mode for precautionary measures. Hughes says there were eight officers on sight, and they were armed with rifles.
"They didn't believe this was a credible threat as it comes to any kind of violence," said Hughes. "Somebody was basically trying to create panic and scare people."
Students were then escorted out of the building wing by wing without being allowed to go to there lockers or gather personal belongings. Canines were brought over to conduct a full sweep, but the dogs didn't pick up anything that was explosive in nature, so at that time, it appeared that law enforcement was correct to believe the threats weren't credible.
The tech team worked with the Hamburg Police Department to try and locate the source of the emails, and they discovered that all of the emails were coming from the same IP address, and the address was pinging on to their network.
That work led the team to the student who was arrested Tuesday and is now facing seven counts of aggravated harassment, six counts of computer trespass with intent to commit a felony and one count of making a terrorist threat.
"In an instance like this, the student will be suspended, as the principal has the ability to suspend for up to five days, and then it would require a superintendents hearing," Hughes noted. "We will be holding a superintendents hearing like we would in this case or any other cases that would be similar. In previous cases or anything like this where a threat is made or not, not even in this great of detail, I can tell you what's happened in the past, and the student has not returned to campus."
Because of the state's Raise the Age Law, the student will remain unnamed and will be taken to the youth part of family court Tuesday afternoon.
