3 Teens Arrested for Threatening 911 Dispatchers, Deputies

The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office says it’s found the people responsible for a series of threatening calls made to 911.

When those calls started coming into the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office’s 911 Communications Center Saturday, detectives dove in to trace the source.

The callers, deputies said, threatened to shoot dispatchers, blow up the communications center and even shoot the sheriff’s office helicopter out of the sky. Since the calls came in from cellphones, tracking wasn’t necessarily easy.

Detectives, however, say they’ve made three arrests in the case. Two 17-year-olds – a boy and a girl – and a 14-year-old boy have all been charged with misuse of the 911 system and for making a threat to discharge a destructive device.

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“All three have admitted to their involvement,” the sheriff’s office said in an email to media.

The hunt for the trio began after the first call was placed to the dispatch center at 7:08 p.m. Saturday. The series of threats continued through 9:23 p.m. A synopsis of the calls follows:

• Call No. 1 – 7:08 p.m.: The caller hung up and the dispatcher made three callbacks to the cell phone number identified. “In each of the required callbacks, the individuals that answered became verbally abusive and refused to provide information required to cancel a law enforcement response,” the email stated. “Deputies responded to an area in the east side of Hillsborough County were unable to locate the cell phone callers.”
• Call No. 2 – 7:40 p.m.: Incoming callers threatened to “blow up the dispatcher, and come down to the dispatch office and shoot the dispatcher with a shotgun.” A second person got on the line to say “he’s coming to blow the station up.”
• Call No. 3 – 8:27 p.m.: Callers again threatened to “blow up the dispatch office.”
• Call No. 4 – 9:23 p.m.: This time the callers used obscenities and threatened to “blow up officers who come out and shoot the helicopter out of the air.” They explained their reasons by saying “they don’t like the police.”

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