An acquaintance of a former Thomas S. Wootton High School student charged with threatening mass violence testified Tuesday he contacted police because he believed that Alex Ye’s 129-page document describing plans to carry out a school shooting was a genuine threat.
Ye, 18, of Rockville faced one charge of threats of mass violence in a two-day bench trial that ended Tuesday afternoon in Montgomery County Circuit Court. The case revolves around the writings of the former Wootton student and whether the document presented an actual threat, according to court proceedings.
At the close of the trial, Judge Jill Cummins said she will announce a verdict Dec. 30.
Ye was arrested April 17 by Montgomery County police and charged with threats of mass violence. On May 30, Ye was indicted by a grand jury with one count of threats of mass violence. The charges stem from the “fictional story/manifesto about a high school shooting,” according to charging documents, that Ye sent via social media on March 3 to the acquaintance who testified. The book revolves around a transgender male student who thinks about shooting students at school and who is hospitalized for mental health issues.
On Tuesday, the acquaintance who received the manifesto testified, as well as Wootton High Principal Douglas Nelson, who was recently placed on leave by Montgomery County Public Schools due to an unrelated incident.
On Monday, defense lawyers Paulette Pagán and David Benowitz of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Price and Benowitz, argued that Ye’s manifesto was fiction, didn’t include an actual shooting and wasn’t a plan for action.
County prosecutors James Dietrich and Karen Mooney countered that the book offered striking parallels to Ye’s life and contained details of how the main character would carry out a shooting. Two police officers involved in the investigation, Jessica Rogers of the Rockville City police and Justin Saffer, supervisor of the behavioral assessment unit for Montgomery County police, also testified. On Monday, Saffer said no guns were found in Ye’s home during a police search.
Tuesday’s testimony
The acquaintance, identified in court as Max, testified about extensive conversations he had with Ye about Ye’s desire to shoot up his school. According to charging documents, the two met when undergoing inpatient treatment at a psychiatric facility.
Max said he called 911 after reading the manifesto’s first sentence — “I want to shoot up my school” — and a few pages, including a paragraph that said the main character had been preparing for a shooting for months.
Max said that when he read the document, it did not include a disclaimer stating it was fiction. The document did contain such a disclaimer when it was obtained via subpoena by police after Max had called 911. Rogers testified she had advised Ye to include a disclaimer after visiting him at home following Max’s 911 call, according to Monday’s trial testimony.
Max said he had extensive conversations over months with Ye about why he wanted to carry out a school shooting, noting Ye said he wanted to gain notoriety.
Although Ye had previously shared thoughts about wanting to carry out a school shooting, including sending the first paragraph of the eventual 129-page document to Max, the teen said he didn’t contact police about Ye until his March call. Max said that prior to receiving the full manifesto in March, he wanted to help show that people facing problems similar to Ye’s could change.
Max said his perspective changed after receiving the manifesto and he genuinely believed the book indicated a threat.
Nelson, the Wootton principal, also testified, saying that in December 2022, a school counselor and assistant principal informed him of mental health issues Ye was facing. This included disclosing homicidal ideation concerning school shootings, according to court proceedings. Due to the disclosure, Ye was hospitalized.
At the time of his arrest, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) said Ye had not attended in-person classes at Wootton High in Rockville since the fall of 2022. Instead, he had been taking lessons through a virtual program called Online Pathways to Graduation. Nelson said Tuesday that Ye never returned in person to the school after December 2022.
After the 2022 disclosure to the school counselor, Ye was classified as a moderate to high threat, Nelson said, and behavioral threat assessment teams were created at the school and at the central office level of MCPS to monitor the situation. MCPS also issued a no-trespass order to prevent Ye from being on school grounds.
After Nelson was made aware of the book in March, he said he convened the central office-level behavioral threat assessment team. The team implemented heightened security measures at the school and at schools in the Wootton cluster. At that time, Nelson said, Ye was classified as a high threat.
Nelson said he was concerned the manifesto included a plan for a shooting at Wootton, although he never read the book and was acting on information Saffer had provided.
Closing arguments
In closing, the prosecution argued that Ye knew his statements in his manifesto would be considered threatening and disregarded this while knowingly providing his writing to Max and one other person.
The prosecution pointed to online messages in which Ye said his statements could be considered terroristic threats and that he was concerned about his digital footprint being “so bad” because he discussed planning a school shooting. In one online message, the prosecution noted, Ye said it would be “so cool” if he and the person he was talking to recreated Columbine, a reference to a mass shooting at a Colorado high school in 1999.
The prosecution also argued that Ye’s book had direct parallels to his life, including his desire to shoot up a school, his search for media coverage of shootings and his disclosure to a counselor about homicidal thoughts related to a school shooting, which led to his hospitalization — all of which also appear in the book. Ye and the main character also are both transgender Asian men.
The defense repeated its argument that the book was fictional and didn’t include an actual school shooting. Pagán argued that Max didn’t read the entire book and neither did Nelson, so they didn’t have the full context in which the character decides not to carry out a school shooting. She noted that Max had asked Ye several times in March if he was planning to shoot students at school and Ye said no.
Pagán said that while Ye’s online records were disturbing, they didn’t amount to a threat. Ultimately, Pagán argued the prosecution was exploiting Ye’s past history of mental illness to construe criminal intent that didn’t exist.
