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(CNN) The 13-year-old son of Rebecca Jones, who claimed he was fired for refusing to manipulate the state’s Covid-19 data while working at the Florida Department of Health, is accused of threatening a shooting at a middle school. Arrested on Wednesday.
The juvenile, who has not been named by CNN because he is a minor, is charged with murder, bodily injury, or written or electronic threats to commit mass shootings or acts of terrorism, according to the warrant issued, and is charged with a second-degree felony. According to the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office.
In a sheriff’s office security camera video obtained by CNN, Jones can be seen accompanying the boy to the sheriff’s office where he surrendered on Wednesday afternoon.
On Thursday night, Jones, who has a sizeable following online, tweeted, “My son is home now and sleeping.”
She said her son’s arrest was related to a lawsuit filed on March 13 in Leon County, Florida, against the Florida Department of Health and a former supervisor seeking to get her job back under the state’s whistleblower law. suggested that lost wages and damages for her treatment as an employee.
A spokesperson for DeSantis passed on questions about the arrest “to the hardworking law enforcement of the Santa Rosa Sheriff’s Office.”
In a tweet, Jones said the sheriff’s office began investigating her son shortly after she filed the lawsuit. claimed that there was not.
However, according to police reports, multiple students at a middle school in Navarra, Florida, told police that Jones’ son was planning a school shooting, and posted threatening memes and messages on Snapchat and Discord. One student told police the boy said he wanted to end his life on Discord and shoot the school.
After issuing a search warrant, police found messages in the boy’s Snapchat account in February that referred to guns and the Columbine High School massacre, as well as plans to shoot people at the school.
In an interview with police on March 23, the boy said he did not intend to open fire on police and that police did not find a gun in his home. He said he didn’t go to school and was homeschooled.
CNN has reached out to the sheriff’s office for additional information about the incident.
In 2020, Jones accused the DeSantis administration of trying to cover up the extent of the pandemic and fired her for refusing to falsify numbers to minimize the scale of the outbreak. The report said her allegations were “baseless” and that the Covid-19 data had not been falsified.
Jones publicly shared her dismissal story before leaving the department in May 2020, becoming a prominent online critic of DeSantis. She ran for Congress last year against Republican Rep. Matt Gates, but she lost.
In December 2020, state police executed a search warrant at Jones’ home to investigate whether she accessed state messaging systems without permission to speak to state officials about a Covid-19 death. She was eventually indicted on her one count against users of computers, computer systems, computer networks, and electronic devices. In December, Jones pleaded guilty and agreed to pay a $20,000 fee in her deferred prosecution agreement before her trial.
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