Tag: Thurmont Middle School

Prosecutor says teacher framing child:

This story keeps on getting better and better…

A prosecutor on Monday said a Thurmont woman facing charges of making terroristic threats against children is trying to frame a middle school-age boy for the crimes.

Friday’s indictment links Ms. Dohm to a suspicious package sent two weeks ago to a Thurmont boy at a residence in the 100 block of Emmitsburg Road, according to Thurmont police.

Coincidentally, Thurmont police were investigating that package as detectives with the county sheriff’s office were searching Ms. Dohm’s home for handwriting samples. The April 21 search was authorized through a warrant signed the previous day.

Evidence obtained during the investigation indicates that Ms. Dohm’s intention is to set up the young boy already ruled out as a suspect for the threats, Mr. Smith said.

Thurmont teacher faces more threat charges:

Michelle Dohm turned herself in to law enforcement today after new charges were filed against her. The new charges are further explained…

Two of the new charges involve a Thurmont boy who received a suspicious package in late April that turned out to be harmless, and a letter several weeks earlier, Thurmont Police Chief Gregory Eyler said. The third threat was received by another boy April 21, according to the indictment, which didn’t specify the type of threat or how it was delivered.

If she is the one still sending threats while she’s being investigated then she has some serious issues to work out. She was released on $200K bail.

Troubled teacher faces new charges:

Michelle Dohm, the Maryland teacher accused of stalking and threatening some students, has had new charges filed against her, seemingly right after new evidence was seized from her home…

The Frederick County Grand Jury today indicted a Thurmont Middle School teacher on three additional charges of threatening to explode a destructive device, State’s Attorney Scott Rolle said.

Michelle Dohm, 41, is set to go to trial June 12 in Frederick County Circuit Court on 12 counts of threatening to explode a destructive device and two counts of stalking.

The new charges were obtained “based on additional evidence seized during the ongoing investigation,” Mr. Rolle said.

Accused teacher files motion against police:

The last we checked in on the Michelle Dohm story, the Md. teacher accused of threatening and stalking some students, the police were searching her house for handwriting samples. Now Ms. Dohm and her attorney are trying to get evidence in that search suppressed…

Thomas Morrow, Ms. Dohm’s attorney, said Frederick County Sheriff’s deputies and members of the Frederick County State’s Attorney’s Office acted unnecessarily and in bad faith by pursuing the warrant, and violated Ms. Dohm’s civil rights while executing it.

Mr. Morrow has requested a hearing in Circuit Court.

“I’m looking forward to see how they’re going to explain this,” he said.

I’m looking forward to that, too. This is almost as good as Law and Order, during the Lenny Briscoe days, of course.

Police search accused Thurmont teacher’s home:

It’s been a while since we talked about the case of Michelle Dohm. She is the teacher from Maryland who is accused of stalking and threatening students. On Friday, local police searched her house…

Members of the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office on Friday afternoon searched the home of Michelle Dohm, a Thurmont school teacher accused of stalking students and making bomb threats in fall 2005.

Police were looking for handwriting samples, according to Cpl. Jennifer Bailey. Officers with a search and seizure warrant began searching Ms. Dohm’s home, at 2 Furnace Court, about noon, said Frederick County State’s Attorney Scott Rolle.

“We felt we needed the (handwriting samples) for comparative purposes,” Mr. Rolle said.

Although Mr. Rolle could not comment on what was taken, he said all the information police obtained would be shared with Ms. Dohm’s defense lawyer.

It seems that there have been further shenanigans in this case…

At the same time as police were searching Ms. Dohm’s house, the Thurmont Police Department investigated a suspicious envelope mailed to a residence at Emmitsburg Road, about two miles away.

Thurmont Police Chief Greg Eyler said he could not reveal what the letter inside the envelope said. However, the letter did have certain similarities to the letters Ms. Dohm allegedly left for students last fall.

One of the letters Ms. Dohm allegedly wrote stated, “Tick tock, tick tock. Is it as bomb or is it a clock. You ignored the note on the van. Now I will carry out my plan.”

“The occupant received an envelope that seemed suspicious,” Chief Eyler said. “It was heavy on the hand.”

Thurmont Officer First Class Christopher McLoughlin responded to Emmitsburg Road and called in the bomb squad, Chief Eyler said. A deputy from the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office also responded.

The envelope, postmarked April 20 and sent from Thurmont, was taken apart, and nothing was found, Chief Eyler said.

“Everything is OK,” he said.

The letter is being compared to the letters Ms. Dohm allegedly sent and being sent to a laboratory for further review, Chief Eyler said.

This is the strangest case I’ve ever covered. It’s like watching a bad made for TV movie.

I received an e-mail from someone in the Thurmont, Md. community about Michelle Dohm, which gives us a little backstory on Ms. Dohm herself. The e-mail has been edited slightly to protect the sender’s identity…

In Sept. one boy found 2 knives and beer in his locker in the morning. He went to the office to tell and Michelle was there turning in a note she stated a woman in a white van with a blonde ponytail gave her. It stated 2 boys were bullying her son and had knives in their locker. Surprise, surprise. Michelle, known as nice but a busy body who has taught there and lived in Thurmont (a small town) for about 15 years did not know the woman or ask any questions. No signature on the letter either. People in town started asking why her? Why couldn’t she give a better description? She is personal friends with both families and emailed the one mom about the knives in her son’s locker before the administration could call them. As time goes on more letters…and then she starts insinuating a 12 year old boy wrote the letters. A friend of all the boys. He is then targeted by other the students. His locker was even vandalized with graffiti. All because this teacher stated he did it. Then that seemed to calm down and I assume the school started to suspect her and did their own investigation. The rest everyone knows. She was removed from the school and so on. We hear there is a lot more to come out and that is frightening in itself. What more could there be? Someone had to know the boys combination to place those things in there, including the letters. The school stated teachers could get access to those combinations which are kept on file in the school. Plus you would need to know where all the lockers were located. Come on, if it is not her then someone else in the school? She is the only one with ties to all 4 boys. Two others listed as getting letters were the janitors…men who claim to have seen her when school was out and then noticed letters sticking out of lockers after she went down the hall. Surprise…who would know that but her? Then they get threatening letters? Too weird for those of us hearing all the rumors. Which they all may be. Everyone needs to draw their own conclusions. We will all have to wait until Jan. 23 when they present all their evidence.

Like the sender said, draw your own conclusions, and I guess we’ll find out more on the 23rd.

Thanks to L. from Lost in Lima Ohio, I now have the transcript of Michelle Dohm appearing on MSNBC. For those of you just joining us, Michelle Dohm is a Maryland teacher accused of stalking and threatening some of her own students. The transcript itself can be found here.

She really didn’t say anything of consequence, but I do have to take her and her lawyer to task for two quotes from the transcript.

First, from her lawyer…

MORROW: Well, I think the explanation is probably a lot simpler than it would appear. I think that if you look at the rather juvenile nature of a lot of these notes, it would appear to be someone who is in the 6th-grade range. The fact of the matter is that it was probably something that was intended initially as a practical joke and unfortunately has been blown out of proportion. I think that’s what we may find when all of the dust settles in this case.

I think the odds of the notes being written by a 6th grader are slim to none, and slim just left.

Usually, 6th graders are usually around 12 years old. I really don’t think a 12-year-old would write a threat like “Tick-tock, tick-tock, is it a bomb or is it a clock? You ignored my note on the van. Now I will carry out my plan.” They would sooner write something like “Im gona kil yew”.

More than likely, these notes were written by an adult. Now, remember, some of the notes were traced back to Dohm’s printer. Now, whether or not the notes were written by another teacher or other school employee remains to be seen.

And Ms. Dohm had this to say about herself…

DOHM: In all the years that I’ve been teaching, I’ve been the kind of teacher where a lot of kids like me. Parents like me. I have a lot of friends in the community, people who are really supportive of me, even right now. And I really can’t think of anybody in particular. All I can think is that it’s somebody who—maybe there’s jealousy involved with the boys and with me. I really don’t know.

Not according to the comments I’ve been receiving from people in the Thurmont community. The opinion is from the comments I’ve received is that she’s a very pushy and overprotective parent and these threats are the result of some kind of social ostracizing against her son by members of the little league team.

That’s all I have for now. More details to follow as they become available.

Md. Teacher Denies Threatening Students:

This is a follow-up to the story of Michelle Dohm, the Maryland teacher accused of threatening and stalking some of her students.

According to the article, she appeared on MSNBC last night to defend herself. I checked the MSNBC website but couldn’t find any mention of her. So if anyone saw the program she was on, could you let me know what she had to say because this article is severely lacking in details.

Basically, the article says, “she was framed”. The article doesn’t say by whom, though. Well, she did say that there is no connection to her son not making the school baseball team.

It seems we have means and motive, but again I’d like to hear about more of the evidence, besides some of the threatening notes came from her printer. However, the notes themselves seem too literate to be from your typical teen who usually uses all caps, no caps, and internet shorthand in their actual writings.

Middle School Teacher Arrested On Bomb Threats, Stalking:

I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard of a teacher threatening to attack a school. A teacher by the name of Michelle Dohm, formerly of Thurmont Middle School in Maryland, has been charged with nine felony counts of threatening to explode a destructive device and two misdemeanor counts of stalking. She could get 100 years and be fined $100K. What did she do?…

Dohm is accused of leaving or delivering threatening notes on at least five occasions from Sept. 28 through Nov. 21. The last note, found in the boy’s bathroom, prompted an evacuation of the school. It read: “Tick-tock, Tick-tock, now you’ll know it’s a bomb and not a clock. At 12 o’clock you’ll know I wasn’t kidding,” Rolle said.

The messages targeted four male students, two of them repeatedly, Rolle said.

In the first incident, on Sept. 28, Dohm is alleged to have given school administrators a note that she told them she got from a parent. It named two school baseball players and claimed they had been bullying the writer’s son, Rolle said. He said the note also suggested searching their lockers for a knife.

Attached to the note was a message made of letters cut from magazines that spelled the words “suffer,” “bound,” “tied” and “die,” Rolle said.

The next day, the boys named in the note reported to the school office that they’d found a knife and bottles of beer in one of their lockers, Rolle said.

A week later, a student’s father found a threatening note on his van: “Play No. 20 and 24 and die,” Rolle said. Those were the uniform numbers of the baseball players mentioned in the earlier note, he said.

On Oct. 17, Rolle said, four students found typed notes on their lockers, reading: “Tick-tock, tick-tock, is it a bomb or is it a clock? You ignored my note on the van. Now I will carry out my plan.” Investigators learned that the notes had been printed from Dohm’s school computer, Rolle said.

On Nov. 1, custodians found folded-and-stapled notes stuck in two school lockers, followed by the discovery the next day of virtually identical notes in two other lockers, Rolle said. He said each of the computer-written notes was titled “Hit list,” and contained the names of at least two students, some teachers and the words, “Boom. Boom. Kill.”

Dohm was removed from the classroom after those notes. In her exit interview with Superintendent Linda D. Burgee, Dohm said that if another note were found, it would prove she wasn’t to blame. The last note was found in the boy’s bathroom a week later, Rolle said.

If all they’re basing this on is the notes came from Dohm’s school computer printer, then that’s pretty flimsy evidence. However, there could be more than they are letting on too. So I will be watching this one with interest.