A Montgomery County grand jury has indicted Alex Ye, a former Thomas S. Wootton High School student arrested in April for allegedly planning a school shooting, on a charge of threats of mass violence, according to the county state’s attorney’s office.
On Friday, Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge James Bonifant postponed until June 21 the morning’s scheduled hearing to set a trial date after Ye was not present in the courtroom. Ye was indicted May 30 on one count of threats of mass violence, according to the state’s attorney’s office.
“I do want Mr. Ye here in the courtroom,” Bonifant said, ordering that he appear for the next hearing.
Ye’s attorney, Paulette Pagán, appeared via Zoom and said that she had filed to waive Ye’s appearance in court. Pagán’s law firm didn’t immediately respond Friday afternoon to a message by MoCo360.
Ye, an 18-year-old Rockville resident, was arrested April 17 by county police and charged with threats of mass violence. He is being held at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in Boyds.
At the time of Ye’s arrest, Montgomery County Public Schools said Ye had not attended in-person classes since the fall of 2022 and had been taking lessons through a virtual program called Online Pathways to Graduation.
According to charging documents, Ye allegedly sent a 129-page “fictional story/manifesto about a high school shooting” in early March to an individual he met while both were undergoing inpatient treatment at a psychiatric facility.
“The story focused on a transgender main character being bullied in school and other issues that Witness-One believed were directly from Ye’s life and not indicative of fiction,” the documents stated.
After receiving the manifesto, the individual contacted Baltimore County police, who reached out to Rockville City police, charging documents said. The witness said the book indicated that Ye was planning the shooting for “the next day” and told police that Ye “was in treatment for suicidal and homicidal thoughts,” according to charging documents.
On March 6, Ye was taken to Suburban Hospital in Bethesda after he was served an Emergency Evaluation Petition and involuntarily committed to the facility, according to the charging documents. An Emergency Evaluation Petition is “a way to get a person who presents a danger to the life or safety of themselves or others to an emergency room to be examined,” according to the Maryland Courts website.
On March 13, staffers at Suburban Hospital alerted county police Sgt. Justin Saffar that they “were concerned enough with the threat posed by Ye that they felt they were required by law to break [confidentiality] to notify law enforcement and Wootton High School. The FBI was also notified,” according to the charging documents.
Following the notification, FBI agents interviewed a counselor at Wootton in Rockville who worked with Ye from October 2022 to February 2023 and learned that during that time Ye “would express violent thoughts such as shooting up the school, wanting to hurt other people,” according to charging documents.
In addition, Ye told the counselor that he was “looking up on the internet how to get a gun and how to get into the school, laws and certain loopholes” and that he wanted to shoot up Wootton High School and his elementary school, Lakewood Elementary School in Rockville, according to charging documents.
During the time between Ye’s release and his April 17 arrest, security and police presence were increased at Montgomery County public schools including Wootton and in the community, Montgomery County Public Schools spokesperson Chris Cram told MoCo360.
The mounting of alleged evidence that police gathered in that timeframe from Ye’s internet searches and interactions on social media led to police making the arrest, police Chief Marcus Jones said at a police press conference April 19.
According to charging documents, Saffar executed a search warrant of Ye’s home on March 21 and allegedly found numerous messages on his phone and computer in which he wrote, “My homicidal ideation has been getting worse lately to the point [that] I might act on it eventually” and “I feel like shooting people would be fun and causing fear,” charging documents stated.
Saffar also gained access to Ye’s Google searches and found that he allegedly searched repeatedly for information about school shootings such as the Parkland and Sandy Hook mass shootings, according to charging documents.
An arrest warrant was obtained April 16 and Ye was taken into custody the following day. Jones told MoCo360 at the time that he could only share that Ye was arrested in the Rockville area and not at his residence.
Ye’s limited access to firearms and Maryland’s “strong gun laws” were praised by county leaders as a primary deterrent to Ye’s ability to carry out the allegedly planned shooting.
“I’m just thankful we live in a county in a state that has strong gun laws, it has collaboration, it has a strong commitment to keeping everyone safe,” councilmember Will Jawando (D-At-large) said at the April press conference. “In this instance, we can obviously always do better and coordinate more, but the system worked and we communicated with each other in a timely fashion to remove this threat and hopefully get this young man and his family the support they need.”
County Executive Marc Elrich (D) also said that the incident underscores the state of the mental health system in the country and could be a “wake-up call” to the county to make more serious investments in services.
“There just are not adequate facilities or practitioners to deal with the mental health issues that exist in our community,” Elrich said. “[Ye] clearly had mental health issues and I think it’d be worth our while to figure out when could we have known or when should we have possibly intervened.”