DENVER — The 14-year-old boy accused of threatening a shooting at Casey Middle School in Boulder will stay in custody at least until next week while authorities evaluate how much of a threat he poses to others, a Boulder County judge ruled Tuesday.
The teenager had threatened to “shoot and bomb” his school, Deputy District Attorney Brad Turner said in court Tuesday. The boy had done research on carrying out such a plot, had gory videos, bomb-making instructions and a photo of a person with an AR-15 rifle, Turner said.
He also had a history of complaints about aggressive and inappropriate behavior at his previous middle school, The Denver Post has found.
District Court Judge Andrew Hartman opted to keep the teenager in custody until he can undergo a thorough threat and mental health assessment.
“In situations like this, the key to eliminating a possible threat, both to the community and himself, is intervention,” the judge said in court Tuesday, describing the boy’s behavior as “very, very, very concerning.”
The criminal case comes in the wake of the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school that killed 19 children and two teachers, and it highlights the complex decisions educators and others must make when assessing the validity of threats and the danger posed by students who make them or display aggressive behavior at school.
The boy’s attorney, Jim Kennedy, argued that prosecutors had reached an “exaggerated conclusion” amid “hyper-vigilance,” and that the 14-year-old posed no danger.
Kennedy had said during a hearing Friday that at least two guns were obtained from the family’s home, but the boy did not have access to them because they were in a safe. The teenager’s parents appeared with him in court Tuesday.
“He’s not a threat, he’s not a risk, and he can be successful and safe in the community,” Kennedy said in court, arguing that the boy’s arrest on May 25 was based on “rumors and third-party statements.”
He declined to comment after the hearing.
The Post is not naming the boy because he is a juvenile. He is charged in juvenile court with interference with an educational institution and inciting destruction of life or property. Boulder police said the threat was aimed at the middle school’s continuation ceremony, which took place Thursday.
Since the May 24 shooting in Texas, at least four schools in metro Denver have faced threats or lockdowns. Northfield High School in Denver was locked down Thursday after a report of a student with a weapon; no one was hurt and police recovered a paintball gun. Cherry Creek High School, Campus Middle School and Belleview Elementary School all locked down after a shooting was threatened at the high school Thursday.
“When we have a major event in the news like this, we see a lot of increased threats,” said Susan Payne, a national expert on school safety who founded Colorado’s Safe2Tell. “We can see clusters and acts of violence. We definitely want to intervene and proceed with caution.”
In the 14-year-old’s case, he has been on the radar of school officials and police for some time, The Post found. Several parents complained for months about the boy’s behavior — which they said included physical bullying, verbal harassment and threats against female students — when he attended Eldorado PK-8 in Superior, according to interviews with two parents and records reviewed by The Post.
The 14-year-old boy was banned from Eldorado earlier this year as part of an agreement between the school, his parents and the parents of five students who complained about his behavior, records show.
The teenager transferred to Casey Middle School in January. It’s a school with more special education offerings than Eldorado, including an Intensive Learning Center for Students with Affective Needs.
Boulder Valley School District spokesman Randy Barber last week said he could not comment on the teenager’s case specifically because of privacy obligations, but said generally school district officials try not to move students from one school to another unless absolutely necessary.
“If there are issues between students, at times we do move students in order to give both groups the opportunity to have a fresh start,” he said.
He said the district takes threats and safety concerns “very seriously,” and added that schools would communicate about students’ behavioral histories ahead of transfers, so teachers and administrators could prepare.
That sort of communication is critical to preventing violence, but school officials sometimes struggle with what or how much information to share about transferring students, said Sarah Goodrum, senior research associate at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence.
“Because there is not clear guidance on this, we may need state and federal legislation to help schools know what the appropriate level of information sharing should be from school-to-school and district-to-district, and also from high school to college,” she said. “That information does not typically leave the high school environment, if it is there.”
The two parents of Eldorado students who spoke to The Post did so on the condition of anonymity out of concern for the safety of their children, one of whom has an active protective order against the 14-year-old boy.
“This was easy to predict,” one father said of the alleged school shooting threat.
He and the other parent who spoke with The Post were frustrated by what they perceived as inaction from school officials after they and several others raised concerns about the teenager’s aggressive behavior at Eldorado.
In a bullying complaint to the school, one girl wrote that the teenager punched, slapped, kicked and hit students, and said he would specifically target female classmates. The student also complained about the teenager’s sexually charged comments, including threats of rape, among other issues and harassment, according to a complaint reviewed by The Post.
In general, schools typically respond to a student’s threat of violence or aggressive behavior by doing a threat assessment and then putting in place a “safety plan” aimed at helping the student succeed at school both behaviorally and academically while keeping both the student and others safe, Goodrum said. School officials should then monitor the student to see if the behavior improves or worsens, and take additional steps as necessary, she said.
“Expulsion doesn’t necessarily solve the problem,” she said. “That means then the student is not being watched. That is oftentimes what makes people feel better — ‘This student shouldn’t be in the presence of my child’ — but it doesn’t address the underlying problems… of why the student is acting that way.”
She added that school officials should make a distinction between “concerning behaviors,” like declining grades or changes in appearance, with “prohibited behaviors,” like harassment, threats and bullying. The latter should raise red flags, she said.
In court Tuesday, Turner, the prosecutor, said the 14-year-old boy “checks just about every red flag” listed by the U.S. Secret Service in a 2019 report on school-shooting warning signs.
“The community is terrified,” he said.
The boy’s defense attorney, Kennedy, said authorities were using a “checklist in place of reality.”
Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty last week said that he could not discuss the boy’s case in detail because of the ongoing investigation.
“It was a very significant threat,” he said. “And I appreciate that Boulder police and the FBI worked closely with our office and moved as quickly as they did to ensure that nothing worse happened.”
———
(Denver Post reporter Jessica Seaman contributed to this story.)
———
