On Saturday night, my teenage daughter received a voice mail on her cell phone. The caller had a creepy voice and called her by name and said “In seven days, I am going to kill you. I’m going to bring my big machete knife and come in your house. I’m going to put a pillow over your face and stab you to death. See you in seven days”
Needless to say we were quite shaken up about this. My daughter was absolutely freaked out. She didn’t want to go into her bedroom alone. She slept in my bed the last couple of nights. We couldn’t imagine who would do this to her.
She’s a quiet kid. She’s just pretty average. She’s an A/B student. Solid but not top of her class . She’s not a star athlete. She’s a manager for the marching band. She’s a good kid who has never been in trouble and is known for helping others.
We suspected a student(s) from school had done this as a prank and so we went the the dean of students at her school on Monday. He was very helpful and got right on it. As much as we brainstormed, we couldn’t come up with anyone who might do this to her.
The school has some Gwinnett County policemen who work on campus each day. They had me file a police report. Then the officer went to Sprint and got them to release the phone number who made the call. It had come in as a private number. He took the number to Verizon and got them to release the name of the person on the account. (They wanted us to wait 10 days!)
The officer called the number a couple of times and finally got someone to answer on the other end. It turns out that the phone belongs to a teenager who lives about an hour from us. She and some of her friends were dialing random phone numbers Saturday night and when they got a voice mail, her male friend was leaving these threatening messages. They thought they were being funny.
What they didn’t realize was that leaving threatening messages like this is a felony. That is a felony count for each message. The officer talked to the mother of this young lady and she convinced him that she would deal with her daughter about this and that she would call the parents of the young man who left the message.
Then the police officer called us and wanted to know if we are going to press charges. We decided that we didn’t want to ruin these kids lives. They made a stupid mistake. We really just wanted to know that this was a prank and nothing to really fear.
What would you have done? Would you have pressed charges? Our daughter was scared to death from Saturday night until Tuesday night. She hasn’t slept. She hasn’t been able to concentrate on her school work.
We prayed a lot for God’s protection and for God to allow the officer to quickly figure this all out. We also prayed for the person who made the call. We are thankful for answers to our prayers.
All we could think of tonight was how grateful we were that she is OK. We are relieved that the whole ordeal is over. We are thankful that the dean of students and the Gwinnett County police officer at our school were really on top of this incident and cleared it up so quickly. We are thankful that it was just a stupid prank and that there is nothing to worry about. There really is so much to give thanks for.
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