SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A 16-year-old Utah student who shared a suspicious text message with a school administrator foiled plans by two schoolmates who apparently were plotting to set off a bomb during a school assembly and run away in a stolen airplane, police said.
Roy High School sophomore Bailey Gerhardt told The Salt Lake Tribune (http://bit.ly/wNs3xE ) she received the text from a friend, one of the suspects, and told one of the administrators, which led to the arrest of the two teens. Roy is about 30 miles north of Salt Lake City.
Gerhardt said Thursday the text from the 16-year-old boy asked: “If I told you to stay home on a certain day, would you?”
That boy, whom The Associated Press isn’t naming because he’s a minor, and Dallin Morgan, 18, were pulled out of school Wednesday.
“It was the work of a very courageous student who came forward,” Roy police spokeswoman Anna Bond said Thursday. “It could have been a disaster.”
Gerhardt characterized the 16-year-old as an angry person recently dumped by his girlfriend. She said he had told her he had looked into the 1999 mass shootings at Colorado’s Columbine High School.
The juvenile later told investigators he was so “fascinated” by that massacre that he visited the Littleton, Colo., school and interviewed the principal about the shootings that killed 13 people. Roy police said the principal, Frank DeAngelis, confirmed that the boy made his visit Dec. 12.
The Roy High School plot “was months in planning,” said Roy Chief of Police Gregory Whinham, and included plans for a device designed to “cause as much harm as possible to students and faculty” at the school, which has about 1,500 students.
The FBI is examining the suspects’ computers, police said. Local and federal agents searched