Two Marshfield 18-year-olds are facing felony charges after a threatening message that looked to be from a Lincoln High School student was found on the school’s Facebook page.
Brandon L. Phelps and Faith R. Brockman each faces charges of being a party to the crimes of identity theft causing harm to someone’s reputation, false reporting of an emergency and making terrorist threats. Wood County Circuit Judge Greg Potter previously set $5,000 signature bonds for each of them. They made appearances on the charges after they were filed Monday.
According to the criminal complaints, on Feb. 5, someone posted a message to the Facebook page of Lincoln High School in Wisconsin Rapids. The message, which appeared to be from a Lincoln High School student, said the poster wanted people dead in the high school. The poster said she loved to kill people, do drugs and cut herself, according to the complaint.
The message named a person the poster wanted dead. She said she, her boyfriend and his friends loved to, “blew up schools and the cops and the gov.” The poster also made a racist comment, according to the complaint.
A Wisconsin Rapids officer met with the female student whose name and photo were on the account that posted the message. The girl said she didn’t post the message and hadn’t given permission to anyone else to use her name or picture, according to the complaint.
Wisconsin Rapids officers learned the Facebook account that sent the message had just recently been created. They were able to trace the sender to Phelps and Brockman’s Marshfield residence, according to the complaint. A Marshfield officer went to the address, talked to Phelps and Brockman and got the two to turn over their cellphones.
A Rapids detective did a download of the phones and found images of the Lincoln High School girl whose identity had been used to create the account used to make the threatening post, according to the complaint. The detective found pictures of a laptop computer open to the posted threat made to Lincoln High School.
The detective also found a video on one of the phones that showed the laptop with the threat and a voice the detective believed belonged to Brockman saying, “You see it says Lincoln High School.” The voice also said. “We got his bro. We got your back. Posted.”