The family of a 14-year-old Columbus North High School student charged in juvenile court with felony intimidation related to a school threat has requested more time to examine evidence gathered by investigators.
The student has entered a denial to the intimidation charge, and a followup hearing is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Jan. 30.
The teen appeared with his parents Wednesday in Bartholomew County Juvenile Court before Magistrate Heather Mollo.
Mollo told juvenile court officials in the courtroom that she hoped to gather more information from discussion with the juvenile about the “why” of the school threat incident.
The Bartholomew County Prosecutor’s office has charged the male teen with making threats on social media to other students that involved a weapon. However, no weapon was located and no injuries were reported in the Nov. 9 incident.
“Some of these posts are concerning,” Mollo said at the end of the hearing. “I found several of these posts concerning as they seemed to be targeted to a particular race.”
The juvenile, who lives on the northwest side of Columbus, spent about a week in secured detention at the Bartholomew County Youth Services Center and has since been released to his home on home detention and electronic monitoring.
He is not being allowed to return to North while his case is pending, according to school officials.
Mollo has agreed to the family’s request to allow the juvenile to take online courses supervised at home by his parents as his case continues. That’s instead of continuing with day reporting, which required the teen to report to the Bartholomew County Youth Services Center for a structured school day there.
The teen told Mollo that he wished to take the online courses, enabling him to keep up with his classmates and graduate on time — something that might not have been possible with the day reporting services offered.
The case is the seventh school threat incident that has been investigated by Bartholomew County deputies or Columbus police so far this year.
This case brings the number of school threats at Columbus North to two, along with two reported at Columbus East, two at Hauser High School in Hope and one at the Simon Youth Academy in Edinburgh.
All but two of them occurred within a week of the Feb. 14 school shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people died.
The North case is the only felony case currently pending before the juvenile court, with the others either settled with an admission of guilt to misdemeanor charges or being moved to misdemeanor status by the court.
State law allows the media to cover cases of juveniles charged with offenses that would be felonies if committed by an adult. The Republic is not naming the juveniles who have been charged with felony intimidation, but has followed each case through the court system or until it was reduced to a misdemeanor and hearings were no longer open to the public.
