Prank sparks lockdown, charges

PALMER — A prank gone wrong Friday has landed an Alaska Job Corps Center student in hot water with the center and with the Palmer Police.

The Mat Su Borough’s Emergency Services Team was staging a regional mass-dispensing drill at the center May 15 when a man in a black ski mask and clothing walked into the gym about 1:30 p.m., and placed an unlabeled saltshaker containing an opened unidentified white powder on the floor and left, authorities said.

At first, bystanders said they thought the action was part of an ongoing hazardous materials drill. However, when the Job Corps’ safety director realized the drill did not entail a situation like that, officials placed the Job Corps Center on lockdown.

Officials say they briefly consider quarantining Job Corps students while they worked to figure out the contents of the phial.

School officials generally said they generally consider the student’s actions to be a prank, while police officers said the 23-year-old student was trying to introduce a real-world element to the testing.

However, Palmer Police Chief Lance Ketterling said his department had no choice but to respond as if the situation was a genuine threat.

“It sounds like there was a student who knew there was a drill going on and he was not part of that drill, and according to him, he wanted to introduce some real-world training into the event,” Chief Ketterling said. “In doing that, when he injected this thing on his own into the drill, he basically created what was assumed to be a live event, and he was not scheduled to be part of it at all.”

Police intend to refer a single count of terroristic threatening to the Palmer District Attorney for review, Ketterling said.

The momentary lapse in judgment could end up with permanent results for the student, said Director Malyn Smith. The Job Corps Center intends to meet with local first responders to brainstorm ways to improve their plans for just such an incident, she said.

“We have an emergency action protocol that we follow in situations like this, and my safety supervisor did a good job of being on top of that in cooperation with the staff from the community who are in the gym,” Smith said.

When they realized it wasn’t part of the drill, Job Corp officials began taking pictures with their cellphones. Those pictures showed a distinctive type of boot. When officials began looking for the person responsible, they identified the man, who was laying on some grass outside the center feigning ignorance, by his boots, Smith said.

“It was like a prank,” she said. “He said to make it more realistic he was going to do this.”

The student was sent home pending possible disciplinary action, Smith said.

Borough emergency manager Casey Cook said any emergency drill would entail serious planning on the part of first responders, and would never include improvisation. The drill in question was designed to test the borough’s ability to use the National Strategic Stockpile to obtain materials during a simulated hazardous materials situation, Cook said. Officials tested the materials in the phial and recorded all the names of the people present just in case the powder wasn’t salt, Cook said.

“It’s never a good idea to do something like that,” he said. “It allowed us to go through our procedures, but it really affected not only the students and the staff at Job Corps, but any time emergency services has to respond to pranks, it really puts a detriment to the whole system, because now we’re busy with something that might affect our response to a real call.”

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.