Threat Assessment Leads to Scores of Arrests

Effort was stepped up after El Paso, Dayton shootings
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 22, 2019 6:16 PM CDT
Effort to Stop Mass Shootings Brings Scores of Arrests
A new threat assessment was ordered by the FBI after the shootings in El Paso and Dayton.   (Getty/domoyega)

After the El Paso and Dayton massacres earlier this month, the FBI ordered a new threat assessment to be made by agents across the country to head off another mass shooting. That step has resulted in the arrests of more than two dozen people charged with threatening to commit mass violence, CNN reports. The cook arrested this week in California after a coworker said Rodolfo Montoya planned to open fire at the hotel where he worked is just one of the most recent cases. A 16-year-old girl was arrested Wednesday in Orlando after officials said she threatened an attack at her sister's Catholic school, per CBS. In a group text, the arrest report says, the teenager wrote, "Next person to say something is the first person I will shoot on the school shooting that will take place this Friday."

Other cases, authorities say, involve a teenager in Mississippi who made school threats, a man in Phoenix who threatened to blow up an Army recruitment center, a 15-year-old Minnesota girl who posted a school shooting threat, and a woman in Palm Beach County who threatened a shooting at an elementary school where her children were being moved. A 38-year-old man was arrested this week in Indiana after a friend said he planned a mass shooting at a church in Memphis and intended to use his knife to kill the pastor, per CBS. In some cases, police said the suspects had weapons, ammunition or explosive devices. A 15-year-old in Florida posted that he was going to use his father's M-15 assault rifle to "kill 7 people at a minimum" at school. His mother said he was joking, but the teenager faces a felony charge. (More mass shootings stories.)

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