CLEVELAND (AP) - A teenager who planned to set off an explosive device at an Ohio high school and called police about a hoax hostage situation at a Kansas elementary school has been indicted on federal charges, prosecutors said Friday.
Allen Martin Kenna, 18, has been charged with attempted use of an explosive device and interstate communication of threats, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Cleveland. Court records don’t indicate whether he has an attorney.
Kenna drew the attention of police in his hometown of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, in early January after he was identified as the person seen walking the hallways of Cuyahoga Falls High School after hours recording a video, an FBI agent wrote in an affidavit. The person fled when approached by school personnel.
He was identified the next day by someone who said Kenna had been talking for months about plans to shoot people at the school during lunch hour, the FBI agent’s affidavit said. The person said Kenna also had made frequent sexist and racist remarks and that he “centers his life around researching and talking about terrorism, white supremacy, and his knife collection,” the FBI agent wrote.
Cuyahoga Falls police arrested Kenna and searched his family’s home on Jan. 8, seizing items that could be used to make an explosive device along with gun magazines, ammunition and knives. Investigators also took computers and other electronic devices that were turned over to the FBI.
The FBI learned from a diary found on his laptop that it was Kenna who called the Riley County Police Department in Manhattan, Kansas, in November saying someone was being held hostage inside a local elementary school, according to the affidavit. Members of a SWAT team learned it was a hoax after several hours of talking on the telephone with the purported gunman.
Kenna in his diary described the hoax as “fun.”
“I mean I guess it could possible (sic) get me notoriety in the long run, but I was just bored, that’s all,” Kenna wrote.
Other diary entries, which he began writing in the summer of 2018, detailed conflicts with his father, his parents finding knives and pipe bomb materials, and his thoughts about mass shootings, killing his family, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and President Donald Trump, the FBI affidavit said.
FBI agents also reviewed videos that showed Kenna inside the high school and describing his plans to detonate a bomb there.
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