Sparks student claims he was joking

Friday, May 21, 1999 | 10:50 a.m.

SPARKS -- A 13-year-old student says he was only joking when he told classmates he planned a shooting spree during a fire drill at his middle school, but police arrested him anyway.

The boy's father voluntarily turned over two or three rifles to the Sparks Police Department on Thursday and the youth was being held at a juvenile corrections center on a charge of making threats, police said.

County school police took the seventh-grader into custody shortly after classes began Thursday at Dilworth Middle School, said Detective Mike Mieras of the Washoe County School Police Department in neighboring Reno.

He said it's possible the boy was indeed joking, but that the school district is taking all threats seriously.

Two other students were arrested at the same school later Thursday for allegedly making threats against the school. But school officials said those arrests were not related to the first boy. No details were immediately available on those arrests.

The school police force for Reno-Sparks and the surrounding county has investigated about 50 threats of some sort since the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado a month ago, Mieras said.

No weapons were found at the school on Thursday, Washoe County School Superintendent James Hager said.

Police started acting about 6:45 a.m. Thursday on a tip to a police hotline that the suspect planned to open fire on students as they left the school building for a fire drill.

They questioned friends and then the suspect directly.

He admitted he originally told others he planned to bring a toy squirt gun and smoke bombs to light off in the school during the fire drill, Mieras said.