E.V. Columbine copycats face diverse fates

A year ago, in the weeks before the anniversary of the Columbine school massacre, several East Valley schools were the scene of cops on campus, students spilling out of evacuated buildings and empty classroom seats belonging to students whose parents kept them home.

And while the media attention on the school lockdowns and their accompanying bomb scares, death lists and massacre plans seemed to die down as quickly as the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre passed, some students accused of creating the hysteria are still contesting their criminal charges and facing stiff prison sentences.

One of them is Brent Clark, a 15-year-old former Powell Junior High School student in Mesa, charged with kidnapping, aggravated assault and terrorism. Depending on the circumstances, the terrorism count carries a penalty of 25 years to life in prison, the same as first-degree murder.

The teenager spent eight months in county jail and is expected to accept a plea deal next month that will land him in prison for at least two years and possibly up to eight, his defense attorney, David Cantor, said.

“It’s so abusive, it’s so wrong,” Cantor said. “It seems like eight months in jail is enough.”

Clark told authorities he held a knife to the throat of a fellow student on March 22, 2007, and stopped short of killing her, court records show.

The next day, he told his parents he planned to hold his school hostage and he had a backpack with a handgun, rope and duct tape inside.

Cantor said the boy didn’t deserve the terrorism charge because he was just sitting in his home with the items and there were “no steps in furtherance” of the crime.

Sally Wells, chief assistant Maricopa County attorney, spoke in general terms about the county attorney’s approach to these kind of cases and wouldn’t discuss any specific ones that are pending trial.

She said that since the massacre at the suburban Denver school on April 20, 1999 that took 15 lives, police and prosecutors have become well trained in assessing threats and use that in determining charges and seeking the appropriate outcome of a case.

“You can’t just label every teen who makes a dark or Goth drawing a threat,” Wells said.

Police and prosecutors first try to determine how credible and serious a threat is and whether a youth has the resources, intent and motivation to pull it off.

Authorities will look at the family, school and social dynamics as well, Wells said.

“It’s not by any means an exact science or check list,” she said.

In deciding whether to charge a child in adult or juvenile court, prosecutors consider the youth’s age and how far along the plan got.

While the Powell Junior High School student was in adult court, a 14-year-old girl from Fees Middle School in Tempe who threatened to recreate Columbine at her school went to juvenile court.

According to court records, the girl was charged with a misdemeanor and the case eventually dismissed.

It took almost 10 months, but a grand jury indicted five former Desert Mountain High School students in connection with a threat to shut down the Scottsdale Unified School District school last year, but they aren’t facing terrorism charges or even the charge of disrupting a school.

They were charged in adult court with burglary and criminal damage for an April 7, 2007, break-in in which chemicals used in the making of explosives was stolen from a science classroom.

Matt Hendley, 18, and Scott Evans, 19, have pleaded guilty to criminal damage, a low-level felony, according to court records, and the rest are pending trial.

Grand jury testimony of a Scottsdale detective shows that the atmosphere was charged in the week before the Columbine anniversary last year, which included the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech massacre where 32 people were killed and 24 wounded.

“We had a lot of anonymous reporting, people they thought were going to come and do a school shooting of their own,” detective Robert Katzaroff said in testimony. “Much of it was on the news and Desert Mountain was no exception.”

Police had found chemicals stolen in the burglary had been mixed into explosives and set off at a Scottsdale elementary school.

A girl who knew the teenagers heard one of them say they were planning to shut down the school April 20 and she knew they made explosives before and videotaped the explosions.

She was afraid they were going to set off a bomb with the stolen explosives, so she reported what she knew to the school resource officer, a police officer who works on campus.

When they called Thomas Coletto, 18, the officer heard him say they were actually going to shut down the school on April 23, and they were going to use a stolen school radio to call in a bomb threat, the detective testified.