15-year-old Whitman County boy accused of making hoax phone calls to police departments across country

A Whitman County teenager was arrested Thursday after police say he made or helped make hoax phone calls to police departments across the country, including Lewiston, according to a Lewiston Police Department news release.

The 15-year-old Garfield boy, whose name was not released, was arrested on suspicion of accessory to false reports of explosives in public or private places, police said.

The investigation by Lewiston Police Det. Zach Thomas started June 19, when police received a call from a person claiming to have taken a 5-year-old child hostage at St. Joseph Regional Medical Center, police said. The caller said he was going to slit the 5-year-old’s throat and shoot anyone who showed up.

The caller described the handgun and amount of ammunition he had with him, according to the release. About nine Lewiston police officers responded to the hospital and placed the building on lockdown while officers investigated the incident. The call was determined to be a hoax after a search of the facility.

The same phone number was used to call Lewiston police dispatch June 20.

This time, the caller said he had placed pressure cooker bombs outside the police department, according to police. The caller said he had an accomplice outside the department who would shoot the dispatcher who took the call and made a series of lewd comments to the dispatcher.

The police department received six phone calls from this number between June 19 and June 21.

Thomas identified the suspect through a series of search warrants for information from various electronic service providers, including Google, the release said.

Thomas learned the teen was involved in an online chat with another user and encouraged that user to make the calls to Lewiston police. The suspect also coached the other user in how to use a virtual private network to mask his location, police said.

Thomas’s investigation indicated the 15-year-old called, or was an accomplice to, “swatting calls” this year to the following police departments across the country: San Marcos (Texas), Moscow, Clarkston, Catskills (New York), Prineville (Oregon), Auburn Hills (Michigan), Orion Township (Mississippi), New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Houston, Honolulu and Irving (Texas).

The boy claimed in online chats he had engaged in this activity for years and even advertised to other users that he was willing to commit these acts for money, the release said.

Thomas also found evidence of digital tools, such as sound boards that play the sound of gunshots and screams to make the calls seem real to dispatchers.

“It is difficult to calculate the amount of resources that were wasted by these calls, as well as impossible to quantify how the public’s safety was jeopardized while law enforcement officers were unable to carry out their duties because they were responding to these hoaxes,” the release said.