Hillsborough County deputies investigate 100+ school threats this week. What’s being done to stop it?

LITHIA, Fla. (WFLA) — The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office has investigated 111 school threats in the last eight days, according to Sheriff Chad Chronister.

Friday, Chronister said he received eight threats regarding Newsome High School in Lithia.

200 people from the sheriff’s office spent hours combing through the high school, searching backpacks and evacuating students into secure locations.

“We have an entire school going on lockdown because, oh you just had a bad moment and oh you just made a joke,” Safe and Sound Hillsborough Executive Director Freddy Barton said. “That joke just cost taxpayers money, it costs students time, it costs teachers time, it cost parents emotional stress because you didn’t know how to deal with something in that one moment.”

Barton works with teens firsthand who make school threats and commit gun-related crimes.

He told us about one 15-year-old, for example, who had previously made a threat to shoot up a school.

“What set him off was somebody talked about him bad and they bullied him,” Barton said. “They were doing bullying on Facebook and he just had enough.”

“Did he understand how serious that was when he made the threat?” News Channel 8 reporter Nicole Rogers asked.

“No; in the moment no,” Barton said. “He thought he was just making a statement to shut everyone up and that was it.”

Barton said there are a couple of key problems.

“One, we have to get our parents to start going in the rooms, looking in the bookbags,” he said. “We have to have a lot more eyes on what’s going on right now.”

“We are seeing now, it’s not that there’s one million more guns available,” Barton said. “It’s, now, they’re more accessible to kids. Kids are still getting their hands on firearms from unlocked cars [and] from unlocked garages. We’re not having enough people to make sure that doesn’t occur.”

Barton explain the power of technology is also at the root of the problem.

“With social media, kids are doing things just to have that 15 seconds of fame,” he said. “They don’t have the coping skills and anger management skills they need to diffuse conflict, so their first act is to pick up a firearm.”

“We have this pressure mounting right now and if we don’t do something serious as a community to reduce the accessibility of guns in the hands of kids and get our kids and families to say we all have to work together, we’re going to see this problem occur more and more,” Barton said.

So what really happens to the teens who make these threats?

“We get everyone involved,” State Attorney Suzy Lopez said. “We look at their prior record, if they have one, do they have access to guns in the home, what’s their school life like, what’s their home life like?”

“There are very serious criminal charges that no 13-year-old, 14-year-old wants to face,” Lopez said. “No joke is worth the time it will take them to go through the criminal justice system or potentially the adult justice system.”

Barton said the issue has to be fixed with tough conversations.

“We’re taking them to funeral homes, we’re taking them to trauma centers, we’re taking them to cemeteries,” he said.

Barton explained, in his program, these teens will come face-to-face with someone who lost their child to gun violence.

“He said, ‘Every single day since someone took the life of my child, every single day, I have an empty chair at my table,'” Barton said, explaining what one grieving parents told a teen in the Safe and Sound Hillsborough Program.

Barton even pairs teens with people who have spent decades in prison, saying one man in particular gave a chilling message about the two sounds that go through his head every single day.

“One is the scream that a mother had when she lost her child and two, the sound of that door closing in your cell for the first time,” Barton said, recalling the conversation a felon had with one of the teens in Barton’s program.

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