Motivated by the 1999 Columbine school massacre, a 16-year-old boy has admitted to planning to bomb his Utah high school. Another student, that shared his text messages with authorities, thwarted the boy's strategy and he recently pleaded guilty in Ogden, Utah's juvenile court, as reported by Reuters.
According to court spokeswoman Nancy Volmer, the charge the boy pleaded guilty to was one count of possession or use of a weapon of mass destruction. Prosecutors have asked that he be given six months of juvenile detention.
The school targeted was Roy High and is located approximately 30 miles north of Salt Lake City.
Prosecutors argued that the boy was serious about going through with his threat to bomb his high school. The name of the boy has not been reported but he was arrested along with an 18-year-old accomplice, D.M., also a classmate at Roy High school.
A third classmate, whose name is also not revealed, shared text messages he had received from the other two that read that they planned to "get revenge on the world."
The boy hatched the plans with the older student that involved assembling a bomb at school. They planned to escape by stealing a small plane, from an airstrip near the school, and fly off.
According to court documents, the boy had a fascination with Colorado's Columbine High school massacre. The incident occurred when two fellow students violently killed 12 of their classmates and a teacher.
In the Columbine incident the two boys didn't flee – they turned their weapons on themselves at the end and died.
A search of both of the boy's homes produced maps of Roy High, flight training manuals and DVD simulation programs – but no explosives or a bomb was found at either home. Prosecutors, however, were able to pursue a weapon charge due to the accusation of criminal conspiracy.
Letitia Toombs, the Weber County Deputy Attorney, said that though the boy claimed that he had no intention of killing anyone, and that he just wanted to show the administrators at his school just how inadequate the school security was – she could not accept that argument.
Toombs said, "Are we 100 percent sure that he was going to do it or not going to do it? What we believe is that yes, he had the intent of going forward with it."
In regards to the boy's guilty plea and waiting sentence, Toombs told reporters, "Nobody has a crystal ball, but the hope is that this is going to wake him up and get his thinking changed so that he doesn't make the same mistakes."
The boy has also been ordered to pay a maximum of $10,000 to the school to cover the expense of having all of the campus door locks re-keyed.
Contact a criminal defense attorney to help you with any criminal charges you are facing. Jail time and fines are items to be worked out with the help of a qualified attorney.
