A judge will rule on the final disposition of a case involving a 14-year-old Columbus North High School student accused of making threats on social media to other students that involved a weapon.
The hearing is set for 9:15 a.m. Feb. 27 at Bartholomew County Juvenile Court before Magistrate Heather Mollo, court officials said.
The juvenile admitted to Level 6 felony intimidation in January during a court hearing.
He is remaining on electronic monitoring pending the dispositional hearing, court officials said.
The case has been pending since last year when the juvenile was detained after the Nov. 9 incident. No weapon was located in the case.
In an earlier hearing, Mollo said she found the social media posts concerning in that they were 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 in 2018, and the only one still pending in court.
This case brings the number of school threats in 2018 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 other juvenile cases were either settled with an admission of guilt to misdemeanor charges or were 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.
