SHELBY TOWNSHIP, Mich. – A 16-year-old from Shelby Township is in serious trouble after being charged with threatening terrorism at Eisenhower High School last March.
The teen used technology to make the threat, which was also used by the police to track him down and arrest him.
Usually, a charge of threat of terrorism would mean 20 years behind bars if convicted, but this teenager is being charged as a juvenile. So while jail time was never on the table, this 16-year-old is still facing a lot of trouble that could be life-altering.
The incident occurred on March 24, 2022, when 100 students were gathered in a common area and a threat of violence appeared on their iPhones via an anonymous airdrop.
“Anytime you send a threatening message nowadays with a gun, a threat towards a school, or anywhere for that matter, we have to take that serious,” Shelby Township Police Sgt. Mark Benedettini said.
The students were visibly panicked, and no one knew where the threat came from.
“There was actually no number when you airdrop it, there was no number associated with it, so we had to use the Michigan State Police forensic crime lab to help track down that number because it came up with no number, just the photo on their cell phones,” Benedettini said.
“That’s not normal behavior to make a threat of violence and/or death against individuals and play a game by airdropping it to say ‘watch your back when you’re coming out of school,’” Macomb County Prosecutor Peter Lucido said.
“A lot of kids were scared, a lot of kids’ parents picked their kids up early,” Benedettini said.
Within 24 hours, police used technology to narrow down the cell phone and arrested the 16-year-old, who will be charged as a juvenile.
If charged as an adult, the teenager could have faced up to 40 years in jail for the threat of terrorism and for using a computer to commit a crime. Lucido stated that he didn’t want to charge the student as an adult, which would have triggered a potentially harsher punishment.
“We wanted non-punitive, we wanted what’s called remedial which means: get them back on track, find out what’s ticking here, and make sure that we can go ahead and fix the cause and effect and move forward,” Lucido said.
Even with the juvenile charge, however, the teenager is still in trouble and could face life-altering consequences.
“We want to get some counseling, we want to make sure that they have house arrest which means they’re gonna be at home, they’re on probation, which means the probation officer comes to visit them, and also the bottom line is, they’re gonna follow all the rules and conditions that are outlined by the judges in these cases,” Lucido said.
Utica School District emphasized in a statement the fact that they want parents to be aware and have these conversations with their kids -- that these kinds of threats are not a joke.