Sheriff Carmine Marceno then posted information about the arrest on his department’s Facebook page, telling The Epoch Times that he can’t “overlook a threat” no matter how benign it may be—even from children.
The mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, remains at the forefront of his mind, he said.
“The last thing we ever want to do is handcuff a 10-year-old,” Marceno said. “But the last thing we ever want to do is talk about a mass shooting—unfortunately in today’s day and age, this is what we’re faced with.”
On May 28, the 10-year-old was arrested for threatening to conduct a mass shooting at his Cape Coral elementary school, according to arrest records. He was charged with making written threats.
Investigators said he sent a series of text messages to a friend and posted pictures of AR-15-type weapons.
Marceno told The Epoch Times that before the child was arrested, investigators for the county’s School Threat Enforcement Team were “acting on a tip” and immediately began “analytical research.” They include experienced sheriff’s deputies who are assigned in a full-time capacity to “help ensure the schools remain safe” and to foster a “secure learning environment.”
The Youth Services Criminal Investigations Division then took over the case due to the age of the child.
“We don’t wait one second—we spoke to the child; we spoke to the parents and, in the end, we had probable cause for arrest.”
Marceno has been criticized on social media for a 22-second video “perp walk,” in which the boy was shown handcuffed and placed into the back of a police car without his face being blurred; the video was subsequently posted to the sheriff’s Facebook page.
The sheriff said he allowed that because anyone, no matter their age, charged with a felony “gets their picture posted.”
“I don’t want people not knowing what’s going on in the world,” he said. “If you’re a parent, you’re going to want to know ... your child’s in class with another child threatening a mass shooting. As a parent, you’re going to want to know.”
Countless parents and guardians are calling, Marceno said, to thank him, because “they wanted to know what was going on in their children’s classrooms.”
Above all, Marceno said he hopes others who want to threaten schools will “think twice.”
The father of the boy says his child is incapable of carrying out a mass shooting and said the pictures of the AR-15-type weapons the child allegedly posted weren’t concerning to him.
“So, personally, he is a child, and so I don’t really know why children do what they do,” the father, who asked not to be identified, told reporters.
“I mean, I remember being young and doing things and not really knowing why I did them. I didn’t ask my son because they were Google stock photos.”
The father, an Iraq war veteran who served in the U.S. Army, acknowledged that he has firearms in the home, but they are “locked away,” and that he has spoken to his son about gun safety.
“I’ve made it very clear that gun safety is very important in my home. I’ve made sure that my children understand what that means as far as like, what it looks like to clear a weapon, what it looks like. Whether or not he knows how to use a weapon? The answer is absolutely.”
While Marceno said he’s sympathetic toward the parents and respects the fact that the father is a military veteran, he says he has to take every threat seriously and maintains a zero-tolerance policy.
“Rifles, a written threat to commit a mass shooting, what if that was not ‘a fake threat’ and we do not look into that?” the sheriff said. “What if someone doesn’t call that in, and someone ignores that red flag?”
The father said the sheriff’s department took his son “without any notice.”
“He [the child] looked at me and hugged me and said he was sorry, and they took him away,” the father said, choking back tears.
The child was ordered to juvenile detention for 21 days but was “remanded” to his home because he was diagnosed with the flu. His arraignment was postponed from June 13 to July 11.
“All I’ve ever wanted to do is protect my kids, and now he’s possibly in danger in a place that is really just a prison for children,” said the father.
A civil rights group, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), is joining the boy’s parents in a legal battle against Marceno for what they say was “brutal treatment for political purposes.”
“Sheriff Marceno applies his policing program indiscriminately,” Letitia Kim, FAIR’s director of legal affairs, told The Epoch Times in a telephone interview.
Kim warned other parents in Lee County of the consequences of their children sending “absurd texts with friends.”
“I have an 11-year-old son,” she said. “This could be my child or any of your children. Think of all the nonsensical and fantastical things your children have said or texted to their friends.
“If you are a parent in Lee County, you should be very concerned because Mr. Marceno’s team might come to your door, drag your child away for sharing absurd texts with friends and putting words into their mouths that were never there. No parent or child should have to endure this.”
Kim said that the events in Uvalde were a factor, but the way Marceno handled the situation was “uncompromising” and he was “blindly following his law-and-order stamp at the expense of a defenseless child.”
“I do empathize with the heightened sensitivity in times like these,” she said. “This coming shortly upon the heels of Uvalde but nonetheless, adults—particularly those in positions of power—need to consider and react to things in adults’ common sense fashion with appropriate discernment.”
However, Marceno maintains that every threat must be acted on immediately.
“We consider it real until we prove otherwise,” the sheriff said. “We don’t have the luxury of not looking into one single threat, nothing goes to the wastebasket.”
Kim said the sheriff was making an example of the child for political gain; she said he was an honor student and a Boy Scout who had never been in trouble at school and was well-liked by his teachers.
“He called himself the law-and-order sheriff many times,” Kim said of Marceno. “And he says his platform is ‘fake threat, real consequences, but I think what we have here is a distorted mix of that, which is fake law and order, real consequences.”
The texts at the heart of the case were between the child and his friend. The parent of the child’s friend became concerned at the images of the weapons and notified authorities, Kim said.
“I do not want to disparage the other parents in any way at all,” she continued. “But my understanding is there was no conversation [between the parents]. The whole thing is just unfortunate.”
Florida, along with 15 other states, allows prosecutors to charge minors as adults “without discretion of a judge.”
Kim noted that because of Florida statutes and point system, the “judge’s hands were tied” when citing the child and subsequently putting him in juvenile detention. The offense the child was charged with carries 17 points and anything over 12 in the juvenile system is an automatic 21-day detention.
“I think the overall takeaway is that there was never a threat of any kind,” she said. “It was a fake threat—nothing real was done—just childish remarks made privately to a friend.”
Marceno said he wouldn’t apologize for doing his job and warned others that if they go into schools with “bad intent,” they would be met with “deadly force.”
“So, we leave no stone unturned, and I don’t apologize for doing my job,” he said.
“Parents or guardians kiss their sons or daughters goodbye and leave them at school. They expect and they trust in me as the sheriff and law enforcement that child is going to return home safely—so I can’t take that for granted.”
