“It wasn’t like they were hanging out playing video games,” Roy Police Chief Gregory Whinham said Friday. “They put a lot of effort into it.”
Dallin Morgan, 18, and a 16-year-old friend were arrested Wednesday at Roy High School, about 30 miles north of Salt Lake City, after a fellow student reported that she received ominous text messages from one of the suspects.
“If I tell you one day not to go to school, make damn sure you and your brother are not there,” one message read, according to court records. “We ain’t gonna crash it, we’re just gonna kill and fly our way to a country that won’t send us back to the U.S.,” read another message.
While police don’t have a motive, one text message noted they sought “revenge on the world.”
The suspects say they were inspired by the deadly 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo., and the younger suspect even visited the school last month to interview the principal about the shootings and security measures.
However, one suspect told authorities it was offensive to be compared to the Columbine shooters because “those killers only completed 1 percent of their plan,” according to a probable cause statement.
The teens had so studied their own school’s security system that they knew how to avoid being seen on the facility’s surveillance cameras, authorities said.
Whinham said the “very smart kids” had spent at least hundreds of dollars on flight simulator programs, books and manuals, studying them in anticipation of carrying out their plan to bomb an assembly at the 1,500-student high school.
While authorities said the suspects believed they could pull it off, experts said, it would have been a long shot.
Royal Eccles, manager at the Ogden-Hinckley Airport, about a mile from the school, said it would have been nearly impossible for the students to steal a plane or get the knowledge to fly one using flight simulator programs.
“It’s highly improbable,” Eccles said. “That’s how naive these kids are.”
Whinham said authorities searched two homes and two cars and found no explosives, but added that police continue to search other locations. The chief said it appeared that “a key component of their plan was not developed.”
“I wouldn’t want to say that they don’t have it or that they weren’t ready for it,” he said. “I’m just saying that we haven’t found anything that says they were ready for it yet.”
Whinham said it appeared the suspects, who have no criminal history, also had prepared alternate attack plans, but he declined to elaborate. He also declined to say whether any firearms were found during their searches.
“most houses have firearms in them,” he said. “this is the state of Utah.”
While authorities have said they have not found any explosives, they charged Morgan on Friday with possession of a weapon of mass destruction.
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/utah-girl-credited-with-outing-plot-by-2-teens-to-bomb-school-during-assembly-flee-in-plane/2012/01/27/gIQAWhMKVQ_story.html?tid=pm_poptag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=17593993892819Top StoriesSat, 28 Jan 2012 00:59:27 GMT”>Student charged in Utah high school bomb plot; police continue investigation
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