Two South Eugene High School students are awaiting charges from the Lane County District Attorney’s Office after paying to have bomb threats made to their high school.

Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner said during a press conference Wednesday that the students contacted an anonymous individual through Instagram, who advertised a service to “help shut down your school for a fee.”

The students connected with the individuals offering the service through Telegram, an encrypted messaging service that is often used to conduct illegal activities. Skinner said it was through Telegram that the high school students asked for the calls to be made.

EPD is still working with the FBI to locate and identify the individuals who made the threatening phone calls.

A 4J staff member alerted the investigators to the Instagram post, which Skinner said helped connect the dots to serve warrants to the suspects.

“If it wasn’t for that J staff member saying that, ‘Hey, I think this might be connected,’ we may not have ever gotten to a place where Telegram was a part of the conversation,” Skinner said.

The caller had the same IP address for every call, Skinner said, and the similarities of the calls made it easier for the EPD and 4J to be more measured in their subsequent responses to the threats.

As for whether EPD and 4J feel more prepared for the next threat of this nature, Skinner said he is not so sure.

“The best thing we can do to keep this from happening is we got two weeks of school left, and we get a break this summer to kind of gather ourselves,” Skinner said. 
4J Superintendent Andy Dey said during the press conference that it is important for students to know that, when they log in to the internet, they are not non-identifiable.

“Please don’t think that you can get away with something like this because the chances are far better that you won’t,” Dey said. 

The announcement that the suspects were identified and the threats were determined to be a hoax has resulted in school-wide relief, Dey said. But the lasting effect of the calls on South Eugene’s students and staff will not be easily forgotten.

“There’s nothing that can be done to repair the harm to those people — mentally, emotionally — that was inflicted over the course of an entire month on purpose,” Dey said.