FLAGLER COUNTY, Fla. – Veteran Flagler County Sheriff’s Office detective Joe O’Barr has a wake-up call for anyone thinking of starting off the New Year by making a fake threat against a school: You’re not gonna get away with it.
Last year, law enforcement across Central Florida was inundated with more than a hundred scary 911 calls threatening to blow up or shoot up our schools.
Thankfully, most of the threats were hoaxes. But every time, police and deputies responded like they were real – putting schools into lockdown and panicking parents.
“We received about 21 calls over the course of a few weeks in May last year,” O’Barr said. “Each one was a rather outlandish threat and you had to treat each one as a threat to life.”
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When it first started happening in Flagler County, O’Barr noticed it sounded like the same caller making the threats – so he dug in.
O’Barr eventually discovered the same-sounding caller made 38 prank phone calls to agencies across the country.
And each time, the caller tried to hide, using a voice-changer to disguise his voice and a computer to mask his location, but O’Barr was able to trace the calls to an apartment in Virginia.
He knocked on the apartment door and a woman, the suspect’s mother, answered the door.
She told O’Barr her son was only 11 years old. O’Barr was not surprised.
“Because online radicalization is becoming much more of a problem,” O’Barr said.
Flagler County Sheriff Rick Staly authorized O’Barr to invest as much as he needed to track down the caller. In all, O’Barr spent almost 600 hours investigating.
“This kid terrorized this community,” Staly said. “The reality of the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office is we put a lot of money into technology and I have skilled detectives and I give them the resources to be able to find these little (expletive) that want to do this.”
O’Barr said the young callers making the hoaxes don’t believe they’ll face consequences.
“So they are more apt to commit a crime,” O’Barr said. “He thought it would be funny. That was it. He wanted to get a rise out of people.”
News 6 is not identifying the 11-year-old because he is so young and because he was sentenced as a child, ordered into a high-risk program that includes counseling and mental health treatment in Central Florida for a least a year.
After that, the boy will be allowed to go home to Virginia under conditional supervised release provided he pay back $46,000 to the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office for the law enforcement response to the fake 911 calls.
Sheriff Staly said the word is out.
“If you want to play these games and attack our citizens in our schools electronically or however, we’re going to find your ass and bring you back and we’re going to hold you accountable no matter how old you are or where you are,” Staly said.
Detective O’Barr had a message for parents.
“I think the biggest thing is for parents to understand it’s not just weird or seedy corners of the internet, it’s not just the dark web, it’s not anything that’s outside the reach of their children, it’s standard internet,” O’Barr said. “Discord, Telegram, Signal, Facebook, Instagram, these are all tools used to radicalized children into violent ideologies, violent groups.”
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