A 13-year-old boy was arrested on Tuesday after Volusia County authorities discovered that he brought an unloaded handgun to his middle school because he was being bullied.
According to the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office, the student, who was not identified by police, was arrested on October 25 at Heritage Middle School, which is located at 1001 Parnell Court in Deltona, after police received reports from another student’s parent regarding a gun incident.
During that incident, the 13-year-old boy allegedly showed off a handgun that he had brought to school with no magazine to another student.
The student who witnessed the incident says that on Monday, October 24, the boy asked him if he “wanted to see something cool” before he reached into his backpack and showed him the handgun.
On Tuesday, the boy told deputies that he brought the gun to school the previous day because he was being bullied. He says he had no intentions of hurting anyone and that he got the gun from his parents’ bedroom closet. He removed the magazine from it for “safety.”
The parents of the boy told the deputies that they always store the gun in a locked, bedroom closet. They say that the bedroom closet was inadvertently left unlocked in this case.
The weapon was collected as evidence, along with another handgun stored in the same closet.
The boy was transported to the Department of Juvenile Justice.
The incident follows a month in which multiple bomb and shooting threats were issued across Volusia, Seminole, Osceola, and Orange Counties. In multiple instances, those threats were deemed to be hoaxes.