Reuben Byon, 17, was arrested last night in connection with bomb threats made to schools in Fredericksburg and Alexandria, Louisiana.
Byon is being held in Gillespie County Jail on a $500,000. He was arrested on a warrant from Alexandria.
The threats to the schools in Alexandria coincide with the threats made to FHS yesterday.
On Tuesday morning around 10:30 a.m., a call was made to the FHS, which was answered by office personnel.
According to a statement issued by Fredericksburg Police Department, an unknown male voice said, “There is a bomb in the school, everybody needs to evacuate.”
At this point, Christopher Ayala, FPD school resource officer, was notified of threat, and in-turn notified Gillespie County Dispatch.
Local law enforcement agencies arrived at the school and began evaluating the situation. EMS and Fire and Rescue Services were placed on standby. Investigators began the process of tracking the phone call that was made to the school while multi-agency teams searched the entire campus.
Law enforcement did not find anything during the search, cleared the campus and allowed students to return to class.
At noon, the county dispatch received a phone call from a FISD school board member who had received a phone call that said, “All dead in two hours.”
The school board member believed that this was related to the prior threat made to the high school.
The high school used “mass text messages” along with Facebook to notify parents of the situation. At this point, students were released and evacuated from the high school and gathered in a safe place.
A few hours later, two bomb-detection dogs from the Texas Department of Public Safety in Austin conducted a thorough search of the high school campus for over two hours and found no evidence of bomb materials.
According to the statement issued by police, law enforcement agencies investigated the phone call that was made to the FISD board member’s phone and recovered the believed phone number. Also, police received a tip that Byon “was bragging about making ‘bomb threats.”
Investigators received further cell phone records from the number that called the board member, and they were able to identify that the same phone number called the high school and several schools in Louisiana, he said.
Investigators reached out to Louisiana law enforcement, who said three schools were threatened in Louisiana.
A former resident of Alexandria, Byon attended Bolton High School, according to his Facebook page.
Alexandria police officers evacuated and searched Alexandria Senior High School, Scott M. Brame Junior High and Bolton High School with the assistance of K-9 bomb detection units, according to a release by Loren M. Lampert, Alexandria police chief.
Byon is charged with three counts of communicating false information of planned bombing on school property for the Alexandria threats.
Lampert said additional charges could be pending in Louisiana as Alexandria officials work the case. Extradition efforts will be made to bring Byon to Louisiana.
According to the report, Fredericksburg police questioned Byon and during a second interview he confessed to making phone calls to the high school, school board member and to an assistant vice principal at the High School.
The report also said formal charges are pending for the threats made to FHS.