Middle Schooler Arrested After School Shooting Threat

On Labor Day, a 12 year old male was arrested after allegedly making threats via video game chat room that implied gun violence plans for Orchard Middle School.

"Through investigation that a group of juvenile males, who are Orchard Middle School students, were playing a multiplayer online video game. And during commentary, one particular student began talking about going to his school at Orchard and shooting up the school," said Captain Edgar Reinfeld, Wenatchee Police Department.

After further investigation, the comments appeared to be significant enough to be qualified as credible threats. According to Reinfeld, he instructed some of the fellow video game players to dress in a certain manner to make it easy for him to target those students. Wenatchee Police interviewed the other witnesses and later sought out the preteen who made the threats.

"We went and sought out the suspect who said he was just joking. We take these matters extremely seriously. We've seen plenty of this nationwide, sometimes these things are ignored and we did not do that in this case," said Reinfeld.

The boy was booked into the juvenile detention center in Wenatchee on charges for threats to bomb or injure property and harassment (threats to kill). Both of which are felonies.