24 Polk County students arrested for written threats since start of 2024 school year, authorities say
POLK COUNTY, Fla. - Since the start of the 2024-2025 school year in Polk County, 24 students have been arrested for written or online threats, Superintendent Fred Heid announced on Thursday.
Heid held a press conference with Sheriff Grady Judd on the recent surge in threats since the fatal shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia earlier this month.
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"Students will be arrested. They will be charged with a second-degree felony," said Heid. "And from the school district's perspective, we will pursue the fullest extent of the consequences for any student or any non-student member of our community who phones these in or posts something online or social media or email."
Heid said the school district will also seek restitution for the time and resources spent investigating school threats.
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Sheriff Grady Judd also announced the arrest of a 30-year-old man for falsely reporting a stolen gun, which led authorities to lock down three buses and put a school on heightened authority.
Judd said Antonio Stancel reported a stolen pair of AirPods and a stolen gun. Authorities pinged the AirPods to the bus loop at Kathleen High School, leading them to believe a student had stolen the earbuds and firearm.
A student admitted to stealing the AirPods but denied stealing the gun. Stancel eventually told deputies he falsely reported the stolen firearm to make sure authorities responded to the call.
According to Judd, for the entire 2023-2024 school year, authorities made 42 arrests for written threats against schools. And in 28 days of the 2024-2025 school year, Polk County has made 24 arrests.
"That's why we're all standing up here today," Judd said. "Because we can't have any more of that."
The sheriff lauded Fortify Florida for most of the arrests, where students reported hearing or seeing threats through the app.
Heid gave an explanation of why he thinks they've seen so many recent threats.
"I think, unfortunately, many of our students believe that social media is an appropriate place for them to try to garner attention," Heid said. "We are very unfortunate that to date, we have been able to disqualify all of these threats. As the sheriff put it, we investigate and we complete more threat assessments than several others do because we do not diminish the expectation."
Judd said some kids just go with the latest social media trends, and authorities have been stamping those out.
"We end up with these TikTok challenges; well we'll TikTok you to jail if you follow those challenges. That's the bottom line to it," said Judd. "The overwhelming majority of the kids go, 'Well that's nuts, and I'm not going to do it.' But a few of the kids say, 'I'm nuts, and I'm gonna to do it,' and then, we're going to arrest them."
The sheriff said he'd rather be speaking to the media about their enforcement and investigation into disqualified school threats than speaking to them after a school tragedy.
"I would much rather be standing here talking about this today than you saying, ‘Sheriff, school board, superintendent, you did nothing, and this kid’s been sending messages for months? And now he's brought a gun to school and shot the school or shot up a kid at school?'"