The bulk of the threats leveled against historically Black colleges earlier this year are believed to be linked to a single juvenile who has been prosecuted as a minor by state authorities, a senior FBI official said Monday.
The juvenile was not identified, but the long-standing inquiry into more than 50 racially-motivated threats that unnerved the nation’s Black colleges is believed to have been resolved with the suspect’s identification and prosecution, said the official who was not authorized to be identified by name.
Federal investigators initially identified “several minors” as possibly associated with the threats, which prompted a wide-ranging inquiry involving at least 30 of the FBI’s 56 field offices, but later linked the communications to one person.
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Citing the suspect’s status as a juvenile, authorities provided no descriptive information or where the person was ultimately prosecuted, except to indicate that the person was ultimately charged in connection with an unrelated threat.
Since that time, the official said undisclosed restrictions have limited the juvenile’s conduct.
The senior official said an investigation is continuing into two other tranches of threat streams: one involving 19 racially-motived communications between Feb. 8 and March 31, that have since been linked to Internet addresses abroad.
Another set of threats, involving about 250 schools and have no racial component, have been tracked since June 7.
The official said federal investigators are making progress, but are “not done.”
Walter Kimbrough, a member of President Joe Biden’s HBCU council and former president of Dillard University, called the identification of a primary suspect “great news.”
“Finding out who was doing this sends a message that there will be accountability,” Kimbrough said.
