Update: The case outlined in the following story was later dismissed on Aug. 2, 2017, according to King County Superior Court records.
King County prosecutors believe a former Todd Beamer High School student is responsible for making a bomb threat against Kilo Middle School students and harassing a school administrator last year.
Andrea Lee Seals, Seattle, faces felony charges of threatening to bomb or injure property as well as cyber stalking. She is being held on $50,000 bail at the Seattle Correctional Facility.
Detectives with the FBI’s Safe Streets Task Force arrested Seals May 2 and charged her the following day after a year-long investigation by Federal Way police and the FBI.
According to charging documents, Seals began harassing a Kilo Middle School administrator on May 20, 2016, when she sent an anonymous email. She continued to call, send voice mails and email from different anonymous accounts until Nov. 29, 2016.
Detectives also believe Seals is responsible for calling the school Sept. 14, 2016, and saying, “Tell [the victim] I am going to blow up the school for her.” Administrators evacuated the school as a result.
Federal Way Public Schools spokeswoman Kassie Swenson said student and staff safety is the district’s No. 1 priority.
“We take any threat of violence seriously, and partner with law enforcement to ensure safety is of the utmost importance,” she said in an email. “This has been an ongoing process since September 2016. During that time, we have partnered with school security personnel and law enforcement to provide additional protection.”
Swenson added the district will continue that protection.
Police say Seals started the harassment with a fabricated story. According to documents, the story stemmed from a now-determined fake allegation – that the suspect’s brother committed suicide because of how a school administrator handled an assault case against the student. Both the suspects’ brothers are alive, however.
Seals repeatedly told the victim that she should die, that her children would be sexually assaulted and that she would “pay” for what she did.
Prosecutors state the suspect’s harassment was “lewd, lascivious, indecent,” “obscene,” “vile” and included threats of injury to the victim and her family.
According to court documents, Seals threatened the victim approximately 20 times before Google finally responded on Dec. 15, 2016 to a Federal Way detective’s request for a search warrant, which was made a month prior.
The search warrant directed Google to provide corporate records with identifying information for three anonymous gmail accounts the suspect was using to harass the school administrator.
On March 7, an FBI detective reviewed the IP addresses used to create the accounts and determined they were linked together. After another search warrant was issued, the detective had an address and the name of the suspect’s roommate.
In April, detectives spoke with the suspect’s roommate and encountered Seals. At first, the FBI detective “recognized her name from the investigative material but could not recall in what capacity.”
Then, it clicked.
Strangely, detectives learned from the victim that Seals’ mother and brother are family friends of hers. The victim knew Seals, but had little contact with her.
One of the detectives returned to Seals’ Seattle home and proceeded to question her. She wasn’t cooperative and referred him to family and friends.
A detective then spoke to Seals’ family. They told him they hadn’t seen or spoken to Seals in two years and had no contact information for her. Investigators also spoke to a former friend of Seals whose brother had died from a disease. She told police she stopped being friends with Seals because she turned “crazy, mean and vindictive.”
“[The former friend] described Seals as ‘conniving’ and said Seals was ‘trolling the Internet’ for information to harm a classmate,” charging documents state.
On April 24, detectives connected Seals’ phone number to the school bomb threat, which allowed them to obtain a search warrant on Seals’ home.
After detectives seized her electronics, which included two laptops, a cellphone and a tower computer, they arrested her. During the arrest, officers said Seals “unleashed a barrage of racial and sexual accusations and statements to members of the task force arresting her and executing the search warrant.”
She also told one officer “she had done Internet research” on him. She knew about his family, his past cases, his education and family background.
“She told him that he ‘would be all over the Internet’ and she planned to ‘blow [him] up,’ an apparent reference to the Internet,” charging documents state.
Post-Miranda, Seals suggested the threats and phone calls were the result of hackers – perhaps someone she offended while attending Todd Beamer.
On May 17, a King County Superior Court judge denied a reduction in bail.