Boy in Mead school gun incident pleads guilty

A 13-year-old boy who took a loaded .38-caliber revolver to Mead Middle School in January pleaded guilty Friday to second-degree unlawful possession of a firearm.

State law prohibits anyone younger than 18 from having a pistol.

The law also prohibits all firearms on school grounds, but Deputy Prosecutor Bill Reeves agreed to drop a gun-at-school charge.

Spokane County Juvenile Court Judge Ellen Kalama Clark sentenced the boy to a maximum-standard 30 days of detention, 150 hours of community service and a year of probation.

During the probation, officials hope to address issues that juvenile probation officer Patti Spilker said make her “very concerned” about community safety and the safety of the boy’s family.

Spilker said the boy has been living with his mother and her boyfriend since his arrest and did some things that “made them uncomfortable.”

While enrolled in the county juvenile detention center’s in-house school, the boy wrote “inappropriate comments regarding obtaining or possession of weaponry,” Spilker told Clark. “…There are continued concerns about his writing in his journal, and there was concern about harm to the family.”

Spilker didn’t elaborate, and Reeves declined in an interview to say exactly what the boy wrote. He said it was more than an expression of interest in firearms, but “not a direct threat.”

Spilker told Clark that the boy was released to unguarded house arrest after a month of electronic monitoring, but he was put back on monitoring less than a month later. Then on March 24, he was confined to the detention center, where he flooded his cell.

“He’s a good kid,” his mother told Clark on Friday. “He’s got problems, but we’re going to work on those.”

The boy had already served 59 days of detention and electronic home monitoring, so he was to be released to his mother Friday. Because his mother’s boyfriend allegedly had been abusive, the boy was to go temporarily to his grandparents’ home on the outskirts of Whitefish, Mont.

Reeves said authorities there will be notified.

The boy’s mother agreed to leave her boyfriend’s home and rent an apartment of her own.

She said the boy’s grandparents – her parents – would get rid of numerous guns and knives while the boy is with them. A condition of the boy’s probation is that he not be in a home with weapons.

He is to return to Spokane and report to a probation officer on April 11.

At one point, the boy told sheriff’s investigators that the gun he took to Mead Middle School on Jan. 10 and 11 was one he had gotten from his father, who had gotten it from the boy’s grandfather.

That was the story he told when deputies didn’t accept his account of finding it on a downtown Spokane street.

On Friday, he told another story about the gun’s origin. He said he found it near his 20-year-old sister’s apartment.

Spilker said the principal of Freeman School in southern Spokane County, where the boy attended the sixth and seventh grades, described him as “a likable kid,” but one who is “crafty and a competent liar.” The boy is “very bright,” Spilker added.

She said the Mead school won’t take him back for at least a year, and the detention center’s school wants him to go elsewhere because he is too young for the program and won’t apply himself to schoolwork.

The boy answered questions when asked but declined to make a statement on his own.

He told Clark he took the revolver to school because “I liked it and I wanted to show it to everybody.”

One of the students to whom he showed the gun told school administrators, who found it hidden behind a toilet.