No charges filed against students heard on scanner

By DAVID KARP

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 13, 2001

TAMPA -- State Attorney Mark Ober decided Thursday not to bring charges against two Sickles High School sophomores who were overheard talking about a school bombing during a cordless phone conversation in their homes.

Ober said prosecutors did not have the evidence needed to bring a case against the two teenagers, who were arrested by sheriff's deputies on felony charges of making a bomb threat, detained overnight and threatened with expulsion.

"We thought the likelihood of a conviction was impossible," Ober said.

The main problem was the state's only witness: Maureen Norbury, 41, who was listening to a police scanner in her home when she picked up a late-night phone conversation by a 17-year-old boy and his 15-year-old girlfriend.

"She has backtracked significantly," Ober said of the witness. "She was hesitant from the very beginning."

Norbury, who never expected the children to get arrested, said Thursday that she did not change her story.

"I stuck to every single thing I wrote," Norbury said. "I never wavered. I never changed."

Norbury was sitting in her Carrollwood home March 27 listening to a police scanner while talking to a friend and watching the Late Show with David Letterman on TV. She overheard bits and pieces as two kids talked about school bombings, and, in an abundance of caution, decided to report what she had heard.

Deputies came to her home that night, and she wrote an account of the conversation. In it, she wrote that she heard someone say: "Sickles is too big to blow the whole school up, so just buildings No. 1 and No. 3 are good."

Then a girl said, "There has to be a way to blow the whole school."

"No," a boy's voice replied, "it would take way too much C-4," referring to explosives.

Norbury had heard the first name of one of the callers, and sheriff's officials tracked down the students and searched the boy's home around 6 a.m., but found nothing unusual. By the time students arrived at Sickles that morning, authorities were searching the campus.

The teenagers explained that they had been speaking about a Time magazine article and were speculating about how hard it would be to blow up a school as big as Sickles, according to sheriff's reports.

After the students were found and the school searched, a deputy who is a school resource officer interviewed Norbury and wrote a report that said Norbury had heard the kids say, "We should blow up the whole damn school!" and later, "We should blow up the school."

Those words do not appear in Norbury's initial statement.

A criminal arrest report filed in preparation for arresting the students asserts that Norbury said the teenagers sounded as if they were actually planning to blow up the school.

Norbury said deputies twisted her words to justify arresting the teenagers. "It's like they made a mistake, they jumped the gun, but . . . we'll blame her," she said.

Attorney Mina Morgan, who represents the students, said deputies and school officials overreacted because of the recent rash of school bomb threats.

Ober had announced a get-tough policy on bomb threats at a press conference shortly before the teenagers' arrests.

"I think there is a serious problem with threats of violence in school," Morgan said. "But I don't think arresting innocent children and kicking them out of school is the proper solution. "Look at the scenario if they had not found a lawyer," Morgan added. "Once the railroad starts, it is hard to get it stopped."

School officials, who initially recommending expelling the teenagers, instead suspended them for 10 days. Officials will consider re-enrolling the kids after a school official evaluates them, said Mark Hart, a school system spokesman.

The Times has not identified them because of their ages.

For his part, Ober said school officials and sheriff's deputies did their duty by pursuing the case. "Had they not done so, they would have been negligent," he said.

Ober's get-tough press conference never meant that he would not look at each case individually, he said. "We are not drawing a line in the sand."

The teenagers "have their whole life ahead of them," Ober said.

"Hopefully, they will put this in their educational memory banks and learn from it."

Recent coverage

Parents: Kids' bomb chat was innocent (March 30, 2001)

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