Woman arrested in Boston Children’s Hospital bomb threat, FBI says

A Westfield girl is charged with making a bomb menace to Boston Kids’s Hospital because the establishment was hit with with threats over its transgender healthcare unit final month, the feds say.

Catherine Leavy, 37, was behind bars Thursday pending a detainment listening to Friday on expenses of calling in a false bomb menace on Aug. 30.

The trade, the FBI stated in paperwork, was a fast one: An operator answering the telephone with a typical greeting, after which Leavy telling them: “There’s a bomb on the best way to the hospital, you higher evacuate all people you sickos.”

She used her private 413-area-code cellular phone to make the decision, feds say, which made it fast for the FBI to trace her down. By Sept. 1, they’d a warrant for the telephone data, and by Sept. 15, they had been interviewing Leavy at her dwelling in Westfield.

“In the course of the interview, LEAVY expressed disapproval of BCH on a number of events,” the FBI wrote in an affidavit. “When brokers additional questioned her primarily based on these beliefs, LEAVY admitted that she referred to as BC on August 30, 2022, and made the menace. LEAVY said that she had no plan or intention to truly bomb BCH.”

Brokers then discovered the telephone in her bed room, they stated.

Authorities didn’t element a lot on the specifics of her motive, however they famous that this was when a transgender-focused unit at Boston Kids’s was getting nationwide consideration, and greater than a dozen threats, together with two of bombs, got here in about that.

The transgender-focused unit, which Kids’s says was the primary of its variety within the nation, started making the information final month after conservative social media accounts started to criticize it.

One of many major ones, Libs of TikTok, tweeted on Thursday after the announcement of expenses, “That is nice information. Threats of violence ought to at all times be taken severely.”

“This alleged conduct is disturbing to say the least,” U.S. Legal professional Rachael Rollins stated in a press convention asserting the fees. “Bomb hoaxes prices trigger worry, panic and a diversion of sources which have actual affect on our communities … It appears that evidently that is occurring all too usually that hoaxes are used to advertise private hateful beliefs and ideologies.”

FBI Boston Particular Agent in Cost Joseph Bonavolonta famous that these expenses can carry a punishment of as much as 5 years in federal jail.

“Making threats of violence is just not a prank — It’s a federal crime,” he stated. “Regulation enforcement should work all threats of violence as a high precedence, as a result of we by no means know if the themes behind them are going to observe by with their actions. These threats with harmless individuals in danger divert legislation enforcement from responding to precise emergencies are expensive to taxpayers, and trigger undue stress to victims and the neighborhood.”

It is a growing story …