| Special prosecutor appointed
By David Hedges Publisher
Times Record-Roane County Reporter
A special prosecutor has been appointed to look into a text message that led to a lockdown of every Roane County school earlier this year.
Calhoun County prosecutor Shannon Johnson has been appointed to the case that involves a son of Roane County assistant prosecutor Drew Patton.
After a teacher at Reedy Elementary received a text massage at work, all six schools in the county were put on lockdown.
The incident that occurred on Sept. 2 was a topic of discussion at a meeting of county school improvement councils last week.
Kris Starcher, a kindergarten teacher at Walton Elementary/Middle School, said some students still
feel unsafe nearly two months after the incident. To prove her point, she called on a Walton eighth-grader who confirmed that she still felt uneasy about what had happened. Starcher said she felt the person who sent the message should be held accountable and at least make an apology for what happened.
Starcher presented the board with several letters, including one from Emily Alvis, the teacher who received the text message, as well from teachers at Walton, from the Walton PTO, from a parent and from a nurse-practitioner at the Walton clinic located next to the school.
Each described both immediate and ongoing problems caused by the incident. The letter from Alvis told of children praying in the classroom for their safety during the lockdown and of one who wrote a goodbye letter to her parents.
Most of the letters urged that le-gal action be taken to prevent such incidents in the future.
Superintendent Jerry Garner said he had contacted Johnson to ask if
she needed any more information about the case. She said she was still looking into it.
Johnson said this week that she has been talking to police departments in two counties about the case.
"There is a detective in Morgantown who's been working pretty diligently on it," she said.
She said a search warrant had been executed to obtain phone records.
While Johnson did not identify a suspect, a Spencer man has already admitted he sent the text.
Preston Patton, 22, a 2011 Roane County High School graduate who attends West Virginia University, said in an interview with the WVU student newspaper that he thought he was sending a message to a friend who is a senior at Roane County High School.
His friend had recently changed cellphone carriers and was given a temporary number that happened to be a number already assigned to Alvis.
Patton had successfully texted with his friend on the temporary number, while at the same time Alvis' phone stopped working.
But when his friend's new number went into service, Patton's texts started going to Alvis' phone.
When Alvis responded to the messages she did not recognize, and asked the other party to stop texting her, Patton thought it was a joke and responded with a message that said he was planning to shoot up a school, without mentioning any particular school.
Alvis showed her principal the message that led to every school being put on lockdown for almost two hours, until the message was traced back to Patton's phone.
Johnson said this week she was still reviewing information relating to the case and that no decisions had been made.
"It's still under investigation," she said. "Before I make a decision, I will talk to school officials and let them know where I am headed with the case."
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