A 40-year-old man was convicted Tuesday of sending emailed threats to commit a mass shooting at Shoal Creek Elementary School in Carmel Mountain Ranch.<\/p>\n
A San Diego Superior Court jury deliberated for about a day before finding Lee Lor guilty of a single felony count of making criminal threats for an email he sent in December 2023 that prompted a police response at the campus and Lor\u2019s arrest later that day.<\/p>\n
Lor is slated to be sentenced next month. The criminal threats count carries a maximum possible sentence of three years in state prison.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors say the email was one of over 400 he sent over the course of several months stating he would commit a shooting at the school, located less than a mile from where Lor was living at the time.<\/p>\n
The December 2023 email stated he was going \u201cto commit mass shootings\u201d at the school and listed the school\u2019s address.<\/p>\n
Another email he sent stated, \u201cI\u2019m going to murder a bunch of children,\u201d while another read, \u201cChildren are going to die and parents can\u2019t do nothing about it. This will put a smile on my face.\u201d<\/p>\n
None of the emails Lor wrote was sent directly to the school. Instead, Lor replied to random spam emails in his inbox with nearly identical threats to shoot up Shoal Creek. One of the emails he replied to on Dec. 1 landed in the spam folder of a woman in Beverly Hills, who alerted police.<\/p>\n
Lor\u2019s defense attorney, Deputy Public Defender Lucas Hirsty, argued his client shouldn\u2019t be found guilty because the email was not sent directly to the school and did not specifically threaten its principal, Harmeena Omoto, who is listed in a criminal complaint as the victim in Lor\u2019s case.<\/p>\n
Omoto testified last week that she felt \u201cshock, disbelief, (and) fear\u201d upon learning of the threat, which she said prompted campus officials to raise the fences surrounding its playground areas. She also said she now stands at the school\u2019s front gates during on-campus events open to the public and she personally checks each person attending the events to see if they have any connection with the school.<\/p>\n
Hirsty argued that because the email lacked any reference to Omoto, Lor cannot be found guilty of threatening her. Similar arguments led a judge to dismiss the criminal case against Lor last year, but prosecutors later refiled the criminal threats count.<\/p>\n
The defense attorney also argued that Lor\u2019s practice of replying to spam emails was an outlet for his personal struggles and that he didn\u2019t intend to threaten anyone or believe his messages were even being read.<\/p>\n
Deputy District Attorney Savanah Howe said Lor was aware his messages would be taken seriously because six months before sending the email regarding Shoal Creek, Lor sent similar emails claiming a shooting was imminent at his workplace, which led officers to respond to Lor\u2019s work. Lor was not arrested at the time for the workplace-related emails, but the prosecutor said, \u201cHe knew this course of action, this conduct, would lead to the result that it did.\u201d<\/p>\n
She also argued that threats made to the school threaten its occupants, and in particular, its principal.<\/p>\n
\u201cA threat to a group of human beings is necessarily a threat to their leader,\u201d the prosecutor told jurors during her closing arguments on Monday. \u201cThe defendant should not get a free pass just because he didn\u2019t put Principal Omoto\u2019s name in the threat.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though the prosecution wasn\u2019t required to show Lor had any intention of carrying out the shooting, prosecutors said that after his arrest, Lor told officers he periodically thought about committing the shooting and how he would do it, but never could bring himself to go through with it.<\/p>\n
Hirsty told the jury there was no law outlining that threats to a group represent threats to its leader.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s an attempt for the government to minimize their burden because they know they don\u2019t have the evidence to satisfy this element (of the penal code),\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He also said that after Omoto was notified of the email, she sent a message to school staff later that day indicating there was \u201cno credible threat\u201d to the campus, which he said showed she didn\u2019t feel personally threatened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 40-year-old man was convicted Tuesday of sending emailed threats to commit a mass shooting at Shoal Creek…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17007,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[7,5189,1312,138,181,23,100,74,84,76,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-17006","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-carmel-mountain-ranch","10":"tag-courts","11":"tag-crime-and-public-safety","12":"tag-latest-headlines","13":"tag-local-news","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-san-diego","16":"tag-san-diego-county","17":"tag-san-diego-headlines","18":"tag-san-diego-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}