When school officials and law enforcement authorities recently learned a student threatened another student with a knife at school, they wasted no time responding, Sheriff Howard Sills said.
The boy showed the knife to another boy in the school restroom and threatened violence if he told anyone about him having it, Sills said.
The incident happened at Putnam County Middle School on April 10, the first-day school resumed after Spring Break.
“The boy who was threatened called his mother and told her, and his mother immediately called the school and the school immediately called Eatonton Police Department, and Eatonton police responded and the knife-welding student was immediately taken into custody and charged,” Sills described.
The boy who had the knife told authorities he took it to school because he had been bullied, but no bullying had previously been reported to school authorities, according to Sills.
The young teen was charged with bringing a weapon to school and terroristic threats. The sheriff said Eatonton Police Chief Howell Cardwell called him and informed him about the incident when it happened.
“Sometimes we (Putnam County Sheriff’s Office) answer calls there and sometimes they (Eatonton Police Department) do; so we both work well together with each other and with the school system,” Sills said.
Cardwell was in a professional training class and not available for comment before the newspaper’s press time, but acknowledged the incident via text and welcomed Sheriff Sills’ commentary in his stead.
In response to social media posts about the incident, which said the weapon was a gun instead of a knife, Sills clarified, “I want to categorically say there was no gun on school property, and no gun was used to threaten a student. This was a boy who brought a knife and the school immediately called and reported it to the police,” he said.
This incident marks the third time this year that a weapon was on school property, but Putnam’s sheriff emphasized that there were no threats of danger at all to any students, school personnel or visitors in any of those incidents. Those other two incidents were also handled swiftly and both of those also garnered false rumors, Sills said.
The first incident was on Sunday, Jan. 8 at Putnam County High School.
A teacher making a delivery to his classroom while school was not in session had a small .22 handgun in his pocket that inadvertently went off and the bullet hit the teacher in the leg. The teacher called 911 and was taken to the hospital for treatment.
School security video footage revealed no one else was at the school and confirmed the teacher’s account of what happened, thus dispelling rumors, Sills said. Because school was not in session, and there was no impending danger at the time of the incident, no charges were filed.
The second incident was on Wednesday, Jan. 25 at the middle school. While riding the bus to school, a middle school student discovered a .22 Derringer in her backpack.
As soon as she got off the bus, the student walked over to the first available teacher and gave the small handgun to the teacher and said she didn’t know why it was in her backpack.
School officials promptly notified Putnam County Sheriff’s Office and an investigation revealed the student’s grandfather had placed the gun inside the girl’s book bag “to hide it from some other children,” he told authorities.
Because the student followed proper protocol, no charges were filed again the student, but her grandparents were both taken into custody and charged (the grandfather was charged for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, and the grandmother had outstanding warrants on unrelated charges in other counties).
Putnam’s sheriff expressed frustration that the gun in the backpack was brought up again on social media on the same post as the recent knife incident. The commenters on the posts accuse school officials and law enforcement of not being transparent.
“I have worked with hundreds of schools in my 49 years of law enforcement, and Putnam County’s school system works with us better than any other I have known,” Sills said. “This school board and this school system is 100% on board with us and we are always notified immediately and work hand-in-hand with them in every possible situation.”