UPDATE: Manchester Woman Charged With Additional Threat To Ocean County Mall

A Manchester Township woman has been charged with creating a false public alarm and terroristic threats after a call warning of a bomb at the Ocean County Mall last week was traced to her, Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph Coronato and Toms River Police Chief Mitch Little announced Wednesday night.

Showander Descarte, 24, of Ridgeway Road, is accused of calling in a threat on Saturday evening, authorities said. Though a search was done, the mall was not evacuated during the Saturday incident, they said.

Descarte was arrested Tuesday night and is being held in the Ocean County Jail in lieu of $10,000 bail in the case.

The investigation continues into the initial threat that shut the mall down for several hours while authorities and bomb-sniffing K-9 units responded to search the premises, which were declared safe sometime after midnight, authorities said.

The call Descarte is accused of making was received at 7:42 p.m. Saturday. Detective Dave Brubaker of the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office High Technology Crimes Unit responded to the scene to assist with the identification of the caller and the unit was able to trace the call to a cell phone used by Descarte, authorities said.

A court-authorized search warrant was issued for the residence and at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday members of the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office High Technology Crimes Unit, Manchester Police Department, and the Toms River Police Department Criminal Investigation Bureau executed it, authorities said. Inside the home was a cellular phone that matched the serial number of the phone used to make the bomb threat, they said.

There have been numerous hoax threats and swatting incidents in recent weeks, including back-to-back threats to Freehold Raceway Mall and Monmouth Mall in Eatontown on Monday.

Reacting to the Ocean County Mall hoax last Thursday, spokesman Al Della Fave of the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office said the incidents are no joke.

“Every effort will be made to identify the responsible person(s) and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law, to include monetary compensation,” he said. “A tremendous amount of emergency response resources were expended and unavailable for deployment to legitimate issues. In this case the OC Mall lost huge amounts of revenue and employees will suffer lost pay.”

The response group in the Ocean County Mall incident included personnel from the Toms River Police Department, Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office, Ocean County Sheriff’s Department K9 Unit (Sheriff’s Officer Christine Casullo and Sgt. John Adams), and Explosive Detection K9s from the New Jersey State Police, NJ Transit, Monmouth County Sheriff’s Department and Kean University, Toms River Police Department spokesman Ralph Stocco said.