Calhoun teen arrested in school bomb threat

A Calhoun teenager was arrested Thursday after reporting a bomb threat at a school, according to the Henry County Sheriff’s Office.

Christopher H. Walker, 17, was charged with making a false bomb report but may be facing other charges, said Henry County Sheriff Kent Oberkrom.

According to reports, just before 8 a.m., Henry County Central Communications received a phone call that there were two bombs at the Calhoun School, one in the elementary building and the other at the high school. After giving brief information about the bombs, the caller hung up.

Central Communications determined the call was made from a dead cellphone, a phone whose service has been shut off but can still make 911 calls, and immediately notified the Calhoun School District and the sheriff’s office.

“We got to the school and deputies starting looking for suspicious items, but we didn’t find anything,” Oberkrom said.

To add to the confusion, Oberkrom said, students were arriving for school, which starts at 8:15 a.m.

“We had kids all over the campus, getting dropped off for school,” Oberkrom said.

“There’s no real protocol in place for what to do with a bomb threat like that. Frankly, we’ve never had to deal with it before. We spoke to the superintendent and together we made a decision to allow the students in the building, then go into a lockdown.”

Oberkrom said with the number of students at the school, the panic that would come with an evacuation would be much harder to deal with, also by this point the sheriff’s office didn’t believe there was a bomb and had a “pretty good idea” of who the caller was.

“Our communications department thought the caller sounded like a younger person, so they sent over the audio file of the call,” he said.

“We played it for school officials and they were 99 percent sure who the student was. Walker has a pretty distinct Southern drawl, and they were able to identify him. He had been kicked out of school the day before and was probably going to be kicked out Thursday as well.”

Deputies arrested Walker, who quickly confessed.

Another juvenile, who Walker told about the bomb threat, was brought in for questioning but later released.

Walker is being held at the Henry County Jail on a $4,000 bond.

“We’re just glad the situation was resolved quickly,” Oberkrom said.