KENT – A 17-year-old Ohio youth who committed dozens of nuisance alarms across the United States including one in western Kent in the summer of 2018 admitted in court Friday to making the hoax phone calls and upon the recommendation of an Ohio prosecutor will receive a one-year sentence with credit given for time served.
The youth, whose name was not made public because of his age, a resident of Mahoning County, was apprehended by law enforcement in Ohio last March after complaints were received by the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office and Kent Police.
The youth was charged with 73 counts of delinquency, 40 of which were felonies, in connection with his nationwide fake emergency calls.
The Putnam incident occurred on August 11, 2018, when the sheriff’s office received a call reporting a hostage situation at a home on Ressique Street during which the caller reported having shot his wife with an AR-15 assault rifle while holding his son hostage.
Sheriff Robert Langley said members of his department and Kent Police rushed to the scene along with the county’s Emergency Response Team.
In the interim, police were able to contact the homeowner who advised he and his family were out of state on vacation and that the home should be unoccupied. A neighbor provided police with a key to the residence and police entered the home, confirming no one was inside and no hostage or other emergency situation existed.
Investigator Matt Tunney began a query into the case and during the investigation, he discovered that the fake emergency call was part of a pattern of such calls perpetrated in other jurisdictions around the country in not only New York but New Jersey, Wisconsin, Florida, California and Indiana when the teenager made the calls from a computer at his home in Youngstown, Ohio.
Sheriff Langley said prosecutors in Ohio agreed to handle the charges and after identifying the caller as the 17-year-old boy, he was taken into custody.
The teenager is scheduled to be sentenced on January 31 to not only the 10 months he spent in a juvenile detention facility since his arrest but the prosecution will ask the magistrate to place him on five years of supervised probation plus ordering him to pay $13,000 in restitution to the communities victimized.
During the past few years, other incidents of swatting have been reported in both Garrison and Southeast.
Sheriff Langley called such incidents foolish and unnecessary adding, “I hope the resolution of this case will dissuade others from trying this type of activity.”
