Arrest Expected

For School Bomb Scare

By Andrew Gorosko

Police have submitted an arrest warrant application to Danbury Superior Court in seeking to charge the person responsible for making a recent groundless bomb threat at Newtown High School.

Captain Joe Rios said this week that police hope to soon receive the warrant necessary to make an arrest. Police require endorsements from a prosecutor and a judge to receive an arrest warrant.

“I believe we have a pretty solid suspect at the high school,” he said.

Police are seeking charges of breach of peace and falsely reporting an incident in the case, he said.

Capt Rios said the suspect is a male “youthful offender,” meaning that he is either 16 or 17 years old.

The identity of youthful offenders who are charged with crimes is shielded from public disclosure by state law. Similarly, the eventual court disposition of such cases remains concealed under state law.

Police also are investigating a recent rash of bomb threats at Newtown Middle School.

The schools are equipped with surveillance cameras that record activity at public areas of the buildings. The recent bomb threats involved handwriting on walls that indicated that bombs were present in the buildings. In each case, police searches of the buildings turned up no bombs.

Those searches sometimes require that the buildings be evacuated, posing disruptions to school classes.

About 9:14 am on May 8, police responded to the high school during a light rain, after a handwritten bomb threat was found on a wall in a boys’ restroom there. The school was evacuated, with its occupants proceeding to the nearby sports stadium, after which they took cover in school buses that were called to the scene due to the rainy conditions. After the high school was searched and no bomb was found, students and school staffers were allowed to return inside.

In investigating the recent handwritten bomb threats at the middle school, “We’re trying to track down all leads,” Capt Rios said.

The most recent school bomb threat at the middle school occurred at 10:48 am on May 13, in which a vague bomb threat was found written on an unspecified wall within the school, resulting in the school’s evacuation while police and school staffers searched the premises.

There also were bomb threats at the middle school that proved groundless on May 6, May 2, and April 29. In those cases, the threats came in form of handwriting on the wall in boys’ restrooms.

“We’re not going to tolerate someone making false threats,” Captain Rios said. Such actions disrupt the schools and the academic environment, he said. Also, such false threats put the lives of emergency services workers at risk, he noted.

School officials have cooperated with police in their investigations into the bomb threats, Capt Rios said.

In February, police arrested a middle school student on charges of threatening and breach of peace for allegedly making a bomb threat at that school last October.

So far in 2008, there have been numerous bomb scares in local schools.

Police Officer Domenic Costello, who is the police department’s school resource officer for Newtown High School and for Newtown Middle School, is investigating the recent rash of bomb threats.