A man arrested last year on suspicion of emailing threats regarding a mass shooting at an elementary school pleaded not guilty Friday to a refiled charge.
Lee Lor, 39, is again accused of making criminal threats after sending more than 350 separate emails over the course of six months stating that he intended to commit a shooting at Shoal Creek Elementary School in Carmel Mountain Ranch.
He remained in custody without bail for 10 months following his December 2023 arrest, but earlier this month, a San Diego Superior Court judge dismissed the charges against Lor.
Prosecutors argued the alleged threat regarding the school originated from the defendant’s belief that his neighbors were angered by him smoking outside his home. He sent the threats, they said, because he mistakenly believed the neighbors had children attending Shoal Creek, part of the Poway Unified School District.
While the emails he sent mentioned the school, it did not reference his neighbors in any way, and Superior Court Judge Aaron Katz ruled the law requires that the threat be specific toward the person allegedly threatened.
The new criminal threats count names Shoal Creek’s principal as the victim.
After the case was dismissed, Lor was released from custody, but after being arrested again, he is being held in Vista without bail.
Lor’s defense attorney, Deputy Public Defender Lucas Hirsty, argued in court that Lor never made any direct threat toward the principal, and said prosecutors have filed various different charges against his client, naming different penal codes and victims.
But Deputy District Attorney Savanah Howe said Lor represents a “significant threat to our community” and said he admitted to investigators following his initial arrest that he researched the school’s layout and that he “thought about committing a mass shooting approximately every month and he thought through how he would carry out that threat.”
Howe said students, parents and teachers have had to decide between attending school and preserving their safety.
“These are not decisions that teachers, staff or parents should have to make. If there’s one place our school staff, teachers, parents and students should feel safe, it’s inside the four walls of their own schools,” the prosecutor said.
At the preliminary hearing on the dismissed charge, Hirsty said his client was essentially “ranting online” by sending out the copy-pasted emails, which the attorney described as “making a cry for help, however horrendous this court may feel it was.”
Hirsty argued for a supervised release from custody, saying Lor is a veteran, has no other criminal history, and has taken steps to improve himself while in jail. He also argued that after his release, Lor did not send any communications or messages regarding the school or his neighbors.
According to preliminary hearing testimony before Katz, none of the emails was sent directly to the school.
District Attorney’s Investigator Yanci Blackwell testified that through a review of the defendant’s emails, it was discovered these messages were sent out in seemingly random replies to numerous spam emails he received in his inbox.
One of those emails landed in the spam folder of a woman in Beverly Hills, who alerted police. Lor was arrested and the ensuing investigation revealed that he lived less than a mile from the school.
