Police: Boy Made Hundreds of 911 Calls

ST. LOUIS – A teenager has been accused of using a stolen cell phone to swamp dispatchers with hundreds of bogus 911 calls over a matter of weeks, at times talking of killing some of the responding officers he could see.

The 15-year-old boy sometimes was such a nuisance he called in new emergencies at the same address where officers already were standing, St. Louis County police spokesman Mason Keller said Wednesday.

Such was the case Sunday, when the young suspect was tracked down only after dispatchers fielded 25 bogus calls within 75 minutes to the same area where the officer already had arrived, Keller said.

The boy has been referred to Family Court, where he was charged with two counts of harassment and one count of making a false police report, court spokesman Kim Moeckel said. The charges are misdemeanors; more charges may be filed. The boy remains in juvenile custody, Moeckel said.

Despite all the bogus reports, emergency officials responded only three times. In other cases, dispatchers recognized the voice of the prankster or the calls came quickly in succession, involving the same address or neighborhood, Keller said.

Still, authorities say such abuses could slow dispatches to real emergencies and put responders – and other drivers – at risk when emergency crews needlessly rush to what turn out to be bogus calls, Keller said.

“Any time the 911 system is abused, it takes valuable time away from actual emergencies,” Keller said.

The reported “emergencies” ran the gamut, from assaults to domestic fights to heart attacks.

Keller said the teen used a stolen cell phone that was deactivated but could still call 911. Dispatchers can track the location of 911 calls from landline phones but not from wireless ones.

On Sunday night, someone using a cell phone made a bogus report of a man with a knife, then called again while an officer was at the scene. The caller said he could see the officer’s car and could kill him, Keller said. The officer’s door-to-door canvas of each house in sight failed to turn up the prankster.

Investigators found the last known owner of the cell phone – a teenager who said it was stolen or lost at school – and compared a list of his classmates to addresses in Black Jack, a St. Louis suburb where the bulk of the 911 calls were sent.

The suspect, a classmate of the cell phone’s owner, was arrested Monday after police learned he lived in the neighborhood.