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Student charged with felony for bomb threat

Police say that a school bus driver saw the 11-year-old boy on the bus with a device that resembled a bomb, and that the driver heard the boy threaten to detonate it on the bus or in a school. SWAT teams determine that there are no explosives on the device, but police take the boy into custody.

March 22, 2011
2 min to read


MILTON, Wis. — Police here reported that an 11-year-old boy who threatened to detonate a fake bomb on a school bus last week because he was upset with his teachers was referred to juvenile authorities on a felony bomb scare charge and was held at a juvenile detention center in Janesville, Wis.

The school bus was full of students and parked in a lot at Milton Intermediate School last Wednesday morning when the bus driver saw a student on the bus who had a device that resembled a bomb, according to The Janesville Gazette.

Officials from the Milton Police Department reported that the bus driver said he heard the boy say that he had a bomb, and that the boy threatened to detonate the device either on the bus or in the school.

The bus driver then removed students from the bus, told the boy to stay on board and called the police. School administrators evacuated the school, sending students to Milton Middle School as police surrounded the bus.

Officers called in a SWAT team from the Rock County Sheriff's Office in Wisconsin and a bomb squad from the Winnebago County Sheriff's Office in Illinois. SWAT team negotiators coaxed the student away from the device and off the bus and took him into custody, according to the story.

The bomb squad removed and destroyed the device, which police said was a hand-held video game with wires and batteries attached. There were no explosives on the device, police said.

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