A mother who reported her 14-year-old son for threatening to shoot up an Indiana middle school could soon face felony charges after prosecutors revealed she took him out of a mental health facility and let him stop taking his medication.
Mary York, 43, called police on the morning of December 13, 2018, and said her son, whose name has not been released because of his age, had taken her boyfriend hostage at gunpoint and had threatened to carry out a shooting at David W Dennis Intermediate School in Richmond.
The boy then went to the school armed with an array of weapons and got in a shoot-out with police that ended with him committing suicide.
Prosecutors in Wayne County filed an affidavit on Friday recommending six felony charges against York – one count felony dangerous control of a child, five counts of felony neglect of a dependent, and one misdemeanor count of criminal recklessness.
They alleged that York prematurely removed her son from a mental health facility, took him off prescription medication because he had said it made him feel weird, and failed to tell the police when he fired a handgun inside their home two months before the December incident.
Mary York, 43, a mother who reported her 14-year-old son for threatening to shoot up an Indiana middle school last December, could soon face felony charges after prosecutors revealed she took him out of a mental health facility and let him stop taking his medication
York called police on the morning of December 13, 2018, and said her son, whose name has not been released due to his age, had taken her boyfriend hostage at gunpoint and was threatening to carry out a shooting at Dennis Intermediate School in Richmond (above)
York told investigators that her son had suffered from depression issues for four or five years prior to the December shooting, according to the affidavit.
He had been referred to Fayette Regional Care Pavilion after expressing suicidal thoughts.
York allegedly took him out of an inpatient treatment program because of the cost and then did not force him to take the medication he’d been prescribed.
According to mental-health records, the boy said he wanted to go to the school, where he had previously been a student, to kill peers who had bullied him.
He apparently heard voices that commanded him to kill someone and then himself.
The boy went to the school on December 13 carrying a rifle, a pistol, ammunition, two bottles filled with gasoline, rags for Molotov cocktails and a handwritten plan of action, Indiana State Police said.
York had already alerted officials and officers were at the school when the boy arrived. He entered the building by shooting through a glass door.
The boy then engaged in a shootout with officers in the stairwell, firing his rifle six times before turning the gun on himself.
York told investigators that her son had suffered from depression issues for four or five years prior to the December shooting, which ended with him committing suicide
York said that there weren’t any warning signs and she was shocked that her son could carry out such an act
Police said more lives could have been lost if York hadn’t made the ‘gut-wrenching decision’ to call police.
On Monday, York said that there weren’t any warning signs and she was shocked that her son could carry out such an act.
‘I tried everything I could to stop him,’ she said.
The mother said the guns belonged to her then-boyfriend and had been locked up in the home.
Investigators determined that the bullying the boy endured at the school was not relevant to the incident, Indiana State Police Captain David Bursten said.
Bursten said the boy was not targeting specific individuals but intended to ’cause maximum damage and harm’.
York, however, claimed that the bullying was the driving force behind the attack. She also pointed the finger at the mental health facility, saying that they shouldn’t have allowed her to remove him if he wasn’t ready.
‘They’re blaming me and my son, but they need to be blaming the school system and this medical facility that let me take him out,’ York said.
She described her son as a caring boy who was failed by ‘so many people’.
‘I can’t ever see him again now. I just feel like everything was not done right,’ she told WISH-TV.
Richmond Mayor David Snow encouraged members of the community to seek necessary aid for mental illness at a news conference in April.
‘It is so important as a community that we remove the stigma of mental health and to make mental health resources both available and affordable,’ Snow said.
Armed police watch as students from David Worth Dennis School in Richmond, Indiana, are loaded onto a bus after the shooting on December 13, 2018