Student, 13, Arrested for Threatening To Shoot Kids at Florida School: Cops

A 13-year-old boy has been charged with threatening to shoot three students at his school in Florida, according to police.

The teenager—a 7th grader at Trinity Christian Academy in Deltona, north of Orlando—was arrested on Monday, said Volusia Sheriff's Office.

Detectives searched his family's house on Tuesday and seized several firearms and rounds of ammunition. They also found two handguns in the garage plus a rifle and shotgun in the trunk of a car.

In the teenager's bedroom, they found a 6-round magazine in a dresser drawer. Ammunition was also discovered "in and around" a cabinet in the home office that had been prised open and in the master bedroom.

A sheriff's office statement posted on Facebook on December 14 said the boy had posted a picture of himself pointing a gun at a student's head.

The statement added: "Witnesses reported [the boy] wrote messages on Snapchat with specific threats including: 'I got 32 rounds for u' and 'I got a hollow point wit ur name on it.'

"During a group Snapchat video chat, witnesses reported he threatened to shoot up his school. In another video, they said he held a gun to another student's head. He also sent a photo of himself holding a black pistol while sitting in the driver's seat of a vehicle."

The teenager has been charged with three counts of making written threats to kill or conduct a mass shooting, and one charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

He was transported to the Volusia Family Resource Center and later to the Department of Juvenile Justice.

The publication Education Week, which tracks school shootings across the U.S., said there had been 49 incidents this year that resulted in injuries or deaths. There have been 142 school shootings since 2018, it added.

Newsweek has contacted the Volusia Sheriff's Office and Trinity Christian Academy for comment.

In May, a fifth-grader in Lee County, Florida, was arrested for allegedly threatening a mass shooting in a text message.

The incident happened less than a week after the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 students and two teachers were killed.

The 10-year-old student was charged with making written threats of a mass shooting. Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno said: "This student's behavior is sickening, especially after the recent tragedy in Uvalde."

In February, law enforcement officials in Mohave County, Arizona, arrested two teenage girls for allegedly plotting a school shooting.

The girls, aged 14 and 15, had made a list of students they planned on targeting, according to police.

Mohave County Sheriff's Office said in a Facebook statement: "The investigation revealed that the two students had relationship issues and stated they had been bullied by some of the students, to which they had intended on fatally wounding."