I'm not surprised the school made a mistake, just that it took so long to realize it

This is pretty amazing. A boy calls the school. The school thinks the boy had called in a bomb threat. The boy is thrown in jail, for twelve days. Then the school realizes that the phone call they traced back to the boy came in an hour earlier than the bomb threat. They had forgotten about Day Light Savings Time!

I'm surprised the boy was in jail for twelve days. Where is Perry Mason when you need him?

Here are the opening couple paragraphs from one news report:

A fifteen-year old boy in America was incarcerated for twelve days, wrongly accused of making a hoax bomb threat - because his school had forgotten that the clocks had gone forward.

Cody Webb was arrested last month, after Hempfield Area High School received a bomb threat on their student hotline – which provides a range of information to students about the school - at 3.17am on March 11th. They believed they'd found the culprit when they traced the phone number they thought was responsible to Webb.

Unfortunately, the school forgot that the clocks had switched to Daylight Saving Time that morning. The time stamps left on the hotline were adjusted by an hour after Day Light Savings causing Webb's call to logged as the same time the bomb threat was placed. Webb, who's never even had a detention in his life, had actually made his call an hour before the bomb threat was placed.

Despite the fact that the recording of the call featured a voice that sounded nothing like Webb's, the police arrested Webb and he spent 12 days in a juvenile detention facility before the school eventually realised their mistake. (The emphasis is mine.)

The incident is getting press across the world.

The last line of the article is:

"All charges against Webb have now been dropped."

I wonder if the parents will sue?

(Hat tip: Risks Volume 24: Issue 63)


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