EDMONDS — Two Edmonds-Woodway High School students were arrested Tuesday for reportedly threatening to kill people at school, in particular classmates who are black.
Both boys, 15 and 16, were booked into the Denney Juvenile Justice Center in Everett for investigation of malicious harassment, a felony. They also were expelled from school, Edmonds police Sgt. Shane Hawley said.
The comments were found in a Facebook group chat that started in August, Hawley said. The messages included detailed descriptions of killings, including “lynching.” There also was language about threatening to “put the school on lockdown and having ‘dead bodies’ all over the school.”
Another student in the chat group reported the messages to the school Dec. 7. The school notified police as well as young people who had been named as potential targets.
Over the next week, detectives interviewed witnesses and both suspects. The boys reportedly admitted to making the comments, though they “denied any intention of carrying out the threats and claimed they were just trying to be funny,” Hawley said.
“We don’t have any evidence there were plans made for any follow-through,” he said, “but considering the nature of the threats and that they directly targeted two people in those threats, that in and of itself constitutes the crime of malicious harassment.”
The police department considered the comments “shocking and appalling,” according to a prepared statement by detective Sgt. Michael Richardson.
“Threats of this nature cannot be tolerated in today’s society,” he said.
The Edmonds School District sent a letter home to parents Tuesday about the arrests. The letter provided no description of the nature or the content of the threats, referring to the matter as “a school threat.”
The ongoing Edmonds police investigation is not the first case to make headlines in recent weeks involving Snohomish County teens and bad behavior on social media.
Earlier this month, a recent Granite Falls High School graduate was suspended from Western Washington University after allegedly making racist threats against other students on social media. Tysen Dane Campbell, 19, also faces criminal prosecution.
Rikki King: 425-339-3449; rking@heraldnet.com.
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