[F]AIR HAVEN — Fair Haven Police Chief Bill Humphries was both thanked for quick actions and pressed about why he didn’t move forward on an arrest sooner in the case of a teenager charged last week with threatening to shoot up the high school in town.
“Fortunately, this developed the way it developed,” said Humphries, one of a dozen panelists who took part in a community forum Wednesday night at Fair Haven Union High School.
“I think we dodged a bullet, no pun intended,” the police chief told a crowd of students, faculty and community members packed into the school’s gym. “We are not Parkland. I would much rather be sitting up here with this panel answering questions.”
The forum was held two weeks after police began their investigation that ultimately led to the arrest of Jack Sawyer, 18, of Poultney.
Fair Haven Police said they first learned of Sawyer’s alleged threat in Fair Haven only hours after a school shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead. Sawyer was arrested the day after the investigation began.
Sawyer faces four felony charges, including counts of attempted first-degree murder and attempted aggravated murder.
He had pleaded not guilty to the offenses and is currently being held without bail. A hearing that started earlier this week is expected to continue Friday to determine if he will remain held without bail pending his trial.
Humphries walked the crowd through the timeline of the investigation into Sawyer that began about 5 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 14. That’s when police and school officials received a complaint of a possible threat against the Fair Haven Union School involving the Poultney teenager.
The police chief said the report came from Jen Mortenson, a concerned mother of a girl he described as an acquaintance of Sawyer.
Mortenson said Sawyer, who had been at her residence that week, seemed to be acting strange, and she had heard that he had recently purchased a gun.
In addition, a friend of her daughter also had said Sawyer had previously made threats against the school, Humphries said.
Police said after receiving that report on the evening on Feb. 14 that the high school was then placed on “restricted access” and all returning sports teams that were to be bused back to the school were rerouted to another location.
Humphries said he was able to locate Sawyer in Poultney that evening, and the teen admitted to recently buying a 12-gauge shotgun at Dick’s Sporting Goods in Rutland Town as well as some buckshot shells.
The police chief said he knew of Sawyer because in 2016 a threat assessment was underway at the school concerning his behavior, which included what appeared to be a fascination with the 1999 shooting in Columbine High School in Colorado.
Before the school could complete that threat assessment in 2016, Humphries said, Sawyer was taken out of the school and sent to Ironwood, a residential treatment school in Maine where he could receive care for his depression and anxiety.
Humphries said as he spoke to Sawyer in Poultney on Feb. 14 he asked him if he was still mad at the school.
“His response was, ‘Not really. I’m 18, I’m kind of over it,’” Humphries said Sawyer told him. “Based on that, we couldn’t substantiate a threat on the school.”
He didn’t have probable cause, he added, to move forward with a charge.
A decision was made to hold school the next day, Thursday, Feb. 15, with added safety measures, including an increased police presence.
“I know there was some questions why we didn’t close schools,” Humphries said. “We didn’t have enough to disrupt the community. We wanted the community to go on business as usual.”
The police chief added, “We were also trying to not overreact. We also have to look at the defendant, at that point we didn’t want to violate his rights. I know it’s not popular with some people, but we are bound by laws.”
Humphries said it was determined that initial complaint concerning Sawyer was based on a community member hearing of that old threat assessment from 2016 and the fact that Sawyer had purchased a gun.
Around 10:15 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 15, police got a needed break in the case, with a report that would lead to evidence of a current threat, he said. That’s when Humphries got a call from a deputy with the Dutchess County Sheriff’s Department in upstate New York.
The police chief said he was told that a student at a local high school in that county reported she had new messages on her phone from someone plotting a shooting at Fair Haven Union High School.
Police identified the person communicating with the girl as Sawyer, and Humphries said Sawyer was detained and taken in for questioning, this time at the state police barracks in Rutland.
A later search of Sawyer’s vehicle that day uncovered a notebook he kept titled, “Journal of an Active Shooter,” that included preparations for a mass shooting at the school in Fair Haven, court records stated.
Also, among the journal’s passages was a kill list, with his first target being the school’s resource officer, Cpl. Scott Alkinburgh of the Fair Haven Police Department, according to court records filed in the case.
Acting Principal Jason Rasco said at the forum Wednesday night that police and school officials were not aware of that journal at the time the decision was made to hold class on Thursday, Feb. 15.
“But boy and boy when that came out,” Rasco said, the threat to the school seemed real.
In addition to questions about why Sawyer wasn’t arrested sooner, panelists also talked about why he wasn’t arrested and charged back in 2016 before he left the school and moved to Maine.
“While it’s not a crime to do a report on Columbine, it’s not a crime to have Facebook page with your images as one of Columbine shooters, it’s unnerving,” Rasco, who was assistant principal at that time, told the crowd Wednesday night.
School officials conducted a threat assessment after Sawyer left the school in Fair Haven and went to the facility in Maine for treatment, but Rasco said, “We had no crimes.”
The police chief added, “We would have arrested in 2016 if we had enough to charge him, but we did not.”
Soul-searching over steps taken
Brooke Olsen-Farrell, superintendent of the Addison-Rutland Supervisory Union which includes the high school in Fair Haven, spoke about the importance of people coming forward when they see something suspicious.
“As a whole, our system worked, because when people saw or heard something, they said something, and law enforcement took actions,” she said.
Olsen-Farrell said the forum was “just the beginning of our conversation,” which will continue with board meeting, staff, parent and staff discussions.
She also said officials are taking actions to enhance school safety, including conducting security reviews, adding a swipe card system for accessing the high school, and increased training.
The superintendent said school officials would be continuing to review the situation to determine what went right and what could be improved.
In one case, Rasco, the acting principal, readily acknowledged something he wished he could go back and change — the cutting off of Wi-Fi service at the school on Thursday, Feb. 15.
He said the decision was made to restrict the service based on rumors that had been surfacing on social media from the night before when police initially started looking into Sawyer.
“I’ll own that,” Rasco said of the decision regarding the Wi-Fi service. “Going forward, it won’t happen again.”
He said turning it off caused more anxiety because it made it difficult for students to get in touch with parents. Rasco said he apologized to the students when he realized it was a mistake and had the service restored within a couple of hours.
The school was already on edge, with many parents opting not to send their children to classes that day. Out of the school’s roughly 400 students, about 100 didn’t attend classes that day, and in 38 of those cases the situation from the night before, when the school was put on “restricted access” for returning sports teams, was specifically cited for the absence.
Rasco also said that before the Sawyer case the school was “a little casual, we were pretty comfortable.”
That has changed, he told the crowd. Rob Evans, the safety liaison officer for Vermont’s Agency of Education, who also took part on the panel, said Fair Haven isn’t alone in that regard.
“That’s the same conversation that every single school district in the state, probably across the country is having right now,” Evans said. “How do we enhance (security), keep it an open and welcoming and encouraging environment, but doing the enhancements that we need to do to make our kids feel safe, our faculty and staff feel safe, coming to school each and every day.”
Vermont Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe commended the community for coming together and refusing to allow the school to be a place where people are afraid to be.
She explained how actions at the state level will help improve school safety, from security audits of educational facilities across Vermont to assisting in adding school resource officers.
Gun legislation that had stalled in the Legislature, including universal background checks for the sales of firearms, has since become a priority for several state leaders.
Scott Hadeka of Fair Haven, whose daughter Reese is a first-year student at the high school, said the district should be doing something for the girl who came forward and reported to police the messages she exchanged with Sawyer over Facebook that helped to lead to his arrest.
That girl has since been identified in media reports as Angela McDevitt, 17, of Poughkeepsie, New York. She was a friend of Sawyer’s, and a fellow student at the Ironwood school in Maine.
“Why can’t I shake her hand? Are we going to send her a card?” Hadeska asked to applause. “Are we even sending her a hooded sweatshirt?”
Humphries said he has told McDevitt over a phone call that she is his “hero.”
The police chief added that Jen Mortenson of Fair Haven, the concerned mother who first reached to police on Feb. 14, also should be recognized.
“Nobody has ever talked about Jen,” he said. “She was upset at one point because she thought, ‘Ohhh, I bothered you.’”
Humphries said he quickly reassured her that she certainly wasn’t a bother. In fact, she was the first person who alerted authorities that Sawyer was back in town and had purchased a gun.
“Those two people need credit,” he said of McDevitt aof Mortenson. “We have two heroes here.”
