Orange County Sheriff’s Office investigators arrested eighteen-year-old Dylan George of Mebane on charges of threatening mass violence on an education property, according to a news release this afternoon.
According to the release, George, a senior, sent a text message to a classmate at Cedar Ridge High School saying that he was going to “shoot up the school today.” The classmate’s parent called 911, and George confessed to authoring the text message, a felony. A magistrate gave him a $75,000 bond, according to the release.
Cedar Ridge interim principal Mitch Stensland sent an email to parents this morning indicating that the threat had, in fact, gone to multiple students: “This morning Cedar Ridge High School Administration and Law Enforcement were made aware of a threat being sent out via text message to students,” he wrote. “School Administration and Law Enforcement immediately began investigating and will continue to monitor and investigate the situation.”
This isn’t the first school shooting threat at Cedar Ridge this year. In May, as the INDY first reported, then-principal Intisar Hamidullah and school resource officer Corporal André Richmond learned of a school shooting threat scribbled on a bathroom wall but failed to report up to their superiors, which Orange County Sheriff Charles Blackwood called “unconscionable.”
Hamidullah was reassigned earlier this year following problems related to class scheduling.
OCSO spokeswoman Alicia Stemper says she’s unaware of any connection between the two shooting-threat incidents.
Contact editor in chief Jeffrey C. Billman at jbillman@indyweek.com.
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