Police- Boy plagued dispatchers with bogus 911 calls

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

The 15-year-old boy, unidentified because he is charged as a juvenile, 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.

Such was the case Sunday, when the young culprit was tracked down only after dispatchers fielded 25 bogus calls within 75 minutes to the same area, Keller 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 or put responders and other motorists at risk when emergency crews rush to respond to bogus calls, Keller said.

The teen "was a safety issue," he said. "Any time the 911 system is abused, it takes valuable time away from actual emergencies."

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

The boy has been referred to St. Louis County Family Court, where he has been charged with two counts of harassment and one count of making a false police report, all misdemeanors. Kim Moeckel said more charges may be filed after all the police reports are filed.

The boy remains in juvenile custody, Moeckel said.

Information on possible charges was not immediately available Wednesday.

The reported "emergencies" ran the gamut, from assaults in progress to domestic fights to heart attacks -- none of them proving real.

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.