Felony charges were dismissed Friday against a man arrested last year on suspicion of sending an email stating that he would commit a mass shooting at a school in Carmel Mountain Ranch.
On Dec. 1, San Diego police announced that they arrested a 38-year-old man for the alleged threat against Shoal Creek Elementary School. In addition, a gun violence restraining order was filed prohibiting him from purchasing or possessing firearms.
The man – identified as Lee Lor in previous media reports – has been in custody since his arrest on charges of making criminal threats.
At the conclusion of a preliminary hearing held Friday to determine whether the defendant would go to trial, Superior Court Judge Aaron Katz ruled that the counts concerned his neighbors rather than anyone connected to the school.
Prosecutors argued that the alleged threat stemmed from the defendant’s belief that his neighbors were angered by him smoking outside his home. He also mistakenly believed the neighbors had children attending Shoal Creek, which is part of the Poway Unified School District.
While the email he sent mentioned the school, it did not refer to his neighbors.
Katz said the emailed threat was “a reprehensible decision” on the defendant’s part and “frightening and concerning and happens far too often in our community and our country.”
But the judge said prosecutors argued the neighbors were threatened “by kind of a tangential relationship.” The judge also said the law requires the threat be specific towards the person allegedly threatened.
According to preliminary hearing testimony, the email in question was not sent directly to the school. Instead, it was one of hundreds the defendant had allegedly sent out over several months, many of which named Shoal Creek Elementary.
District Attorney’s Investigator Yanci Blackwell testified that through a review of the defendant’s emails, it was discovered that around 200 of these messages were sent out in seemingly random replies to numerous emails he received in his inbox.
The Dec. 1 email he sent went into the spam folder of a woman in Beverly Hills, who alerted police. The defendant was arrested and the ensuing police investigation found that he lived less than a mile from the school.
Blackwell testified that he interviewed the neighbors, who said they never had any interaction with the defendant over his smoking. However, two of the neighbors testified about making comments to one another about his smoking and noticed the defendant “glaring” at them afterward.
During an interview with police, the man said he sent out the email as “more of a joke” and had recently been depressed due to deaths in his family.
Deputy Public Defender Lucas Hirsty argued that the criminal threats counts should be dismissed because his client never directly threatened the neighbors, either in the emails or in any other form.
Hirsty said his client told police that he was essentially “ranting online” by sending out the emails, which the attorney described as “making a cry for help, however horrendous this court may feel it was.”
City News Service contributed to this report.
