2 Fort Bend Students Charged With Terroristic Threat

RICHMOND, TX — Threats on social media to cause violence and mayhem on school campuses has become all too common, but in the days following a shooting inside a Florida high school that left 17 people dead, law enforcement officials take those types of threats seriously.

On Friday, two Fort Bend ISD students learned this lesson the hard way when they made threats on the Snapchat social media platform to shoot up their respective schools.

Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls said a 14-year old student at Billy Baines Middle School in Misouri City sent out a Snapchat message threatening to shoot up the school, while a 15-year old student at the Harmony School in Katy showed a picture of students fleeing from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, and threatened that the same would happen there at the Hamony School campus in Katy.

The student followed up that threat with a link describing how to sneak guns onto the campus.

"Forty-eight hours ago, this county endured another school shooting taking the lives of many young people at a high school in Florida, and what we are seeing in Fort Bend County today — not even 48 hours after that horrific shooting — is young people on social media platforms sending threatening messages...," Nehls said during a pres conference on Friday.

In the first instance, a parent was alerted and called the Fort Bend ISD police about the threat.

In the second threat, parents heard about the threat and called the school, who called the sheriff's office.

"What would drive them to do such a thing?" Nehls asked.

Whatever it is, they are learning the hard way that threats like this are taken seriously.

Both are in the Fort Bend County Juvenile Detention Center, charged with making a terroristic threat, a third degree felony in Texas.

Nehls said making threats like this, even as a joke, is never funny, especially in ligt of recent events.

"This isn't fun and games," Nehls said. "Once it reaches us here, the game is over. It's no fun anymore. We take these threats very seriously."

Nehls urged parents to have a conversation with their children about what they post on social media, and the consequences of posting anything related to threating school violence.

"Parents need to parent, and have a casual conversation with their kids," he said.

This is a developing story.