Student arrested after threat made online against Puyallup school

Puyallup police arrested an Emerald Ridge High School student in connection with threats that closed the school and a nearby middle school Tuesday, the department said at an afternoon press conference.

The 16-year-old girl was booked into the Remann Hall juvenile detention center in Tacoma on charges of felony harassment and threats, police said.

Police said the incident was not linked to terrorism and they do not suspect further safety concerns.

“We are very comfortable that this is a lone person, a lone offender, a juvenile who posted this for very personal reasons,” police spokesman Scott Engle said.

No other suspects are being sought, he said.

A profane, all-caps threat to bomb the school and shoot students and “dumb rude teachers” led Puyallup School District to close Emerald Ridge and nearby Glacier View Middle School for the day.

The schools are about a quarter mile apart in the 12000 block of 184th Street East.

“It appears based on the post that our suspect is not someone who has regularly attended school and did not have an interest in regularly attending school,” Engle said. “Some of the information that was actually posted in the post appears to have been done specifically to hide their identity.”

The threat was posted about 1:55 a.m. Monday to Ask.fm, a website formerly known as Formspring where people can solicit questions and submit answers to them, police said.

Interpol in Dublin, Ireland, notified its office in Washington, D.C., which contacted the U.S. Department of Justice. Puyallup police learned of the threats just before 4 a.m. Tuesday, the department said.

The FBI joined the investigation about 9 a.m.

Puyallup police informed the school district of the threats, which led the district to shut down the two schools.

“This worked exactly the way this was supposed to work,” school district Superintendent Tim Yeomans said. “We had communication from 4:30 in the morning all the way through the day.”

After identifying a location of interest through the internet protocol address of the person who posted the threat, police obtained a search warrant and seized two items from a Puyallup apartment about 9:30 a.m.

The suspect was arrested about 3 p.m. and was taken to Remann Hall, where she will be arraigned Wednesday (Oct. 5) in Pierce County Juvenile Court, police said.

“This particular offender doesn’t have a great track record of actually attending school in the first place and certainly has only been at Emerald Ridge since the beginning of the school year two to three times at most,” Engel said.

Classes at Emerald Ridge and Glacier View are expected to resume as scheduled Wednesday, Yeomans said.

After-school activities at both schools were canceled, except for Emerald Ridge girls swimming, for which students boarded a bus at Ferrucci Junior High School before traveling to South Kitsap High School in Port Orchard.

This story was originally published October 4, 2016 at 7:26 AM with the headline "Student arrested after threat made online against Puyallup school."