Teen arrested in armed plot on Pennsylvania school

By Jon Hurdle

PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - A 14-year-old boy armed with a rifle, homemade grenades, dozens of pellet guns, knives and swords was arrested after confessing to plotting a "Columbine-like attack" on a high school, police said on Thursday.

The unidentified boy told police he was a planning an attack on Plymouth Whitemarsh High School similar to the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado in which two students killed 13 people, said Joe Lawrence, deputy chief of police in Plymouth Meeting.

Acting on a tip from neighbors, police arrested the boy at his home north of Philadelphia on Wednesday night.

They found one Hi-Tech 9 mm rifle with a laser sight, 30 to 50 pellet guns, and seven homemade hand grenades, four of which were live and three of which were still being made, Lawrence said.

Police also found at least 10 knives with fixed blades 7 to 10 inches long, plus at least five swords. They were looking for more weapons at another location, he said.

No ammunition was found for the rifle, a prosecutor said.

"I heard they called him strange, they called him fat," said Whitemarsh student Samir Panah, 15. "I think he just couldn't take the pressure. A lot of kids get bullied and they try to seek revenge, kind of like the Columbine situation. If he was at school, God knows what would have happened."

The boy was schooled at home where he lived with his mother and father, both of whom knew about the weapons, Lawrence said. The mother bought him the rifle at a gun show, he said.

Lawrence declined to say whether the boy was inspired by events in Ohio on Wednesday, when a 14-year-old student shot and wounded two adults and two students and killed himself.

Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor told CNN a student and his father went to a police station around 7 p.m. on Wednesday to alert officers about a planned attack.

The student told police "this suspect had tried to recruit him to be involved in this Columbine-type of attack. The police acted on that immediately and we had the boy in custody before midnight last night," Castor said.

He said the grenade was "not like a military grenade, there's BBs in there" and that it was legal for a 14-year-old to own a BB gun.

"We are evaluating now whether charges against her (the mother) or anyone else in that household are warranted," Castor said. "I think that it would be impossible for both parents to be totally in the dark."

(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols in New York)