Daylight Saving Time snafu lands kid in jail

Daylight Savings Time

From the “spring forward fall back” department:

A fifteen-year old boy in Pennsylvania was incarcerated for twelve days, wrongly accused of making a hoax bomb threat – because his school had forgotten about the change to Daylight Saving Time.

Cody Webb was arrested last month, after Hempfield Area High School received a bomb threat on their student hotline – which provides a range of information to students about the school – at 3.17am on March 11th. They believed they’d found the culprit when they traced the call they thought was responsible to Webb.

They simply lined up the time of the bomb threat being called in to the phone numbers on the caller ID.

Unfortunately, the school staff forgot that the clocks had switched to Daylight Saving Time that morning. The time stamps left on the hotline caller ID were adjusted by an hour after Day Light Savings causing Webb’s call to logged as the same time the bomb threat was placed. Webb, who’s never even had a detention in his life, had actually made his call an hour before the bomb threat was placed.

Despite the fact that the recording of the call featured a voice that sounded nothing like Webb’s, the police arrested Webb and he spent 12 days in a juvenile detention facility before the school eventually realized their mistake.

Webb gave an insight into the school’s impressive investigative techniques, saying that he was hauled in to see the principal, Kathy Charlton. She asked him what his phone number was, and , according to Webb, when he replied ‘she started waving her hands in the air and saying “we got him, we got him.”’

‘They just started flipping out, saying I made a bomb threat to the school,’ he told local television station KDKA. After he protested his innocence, Webb says that the principal said: ‘Well, why should we believe you? You’re a criminal. Criminals lie all the time.’

All charges against Webb have now been dropped. Now starts the payback process.

2 thoughts on “Daylight Saving Time snafu lands kid in jail

  1. What I want to know is why this was not all over the news. Why wasn’t everyone out yelling “how could this happen?!?” Why wasn’t there a press conference telling the world what they did? I hope the school pays dearly for this.
    *** Reply: Its was all over the News in Pittsburgh, station KDKA covered it and the Pittsburgh newpaper did an editorial on it.
    Its now being vetted nationally by several outlets

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