CLEARFIELD – A Clearfield man accused of making a bomb threat to the Wal-Mart Supercenter was sentenced on Tuesday.
Ryan Price pleaded guilty to threat to use weapons, terroristic threats, criminal mischief, criminal solicitation to commit retail theft and criminal conspiracy to commit retail theft.
On threats to use weapons Price was sentenced to two years probation and four months in Clearfield County Jail. He was ordered to submit to DNA testing and is not to enter onto the property of Wal-Mart Supercenter in Lawrence Township. On the charges of terroristic threats and criminal mischief he was sentenced to two years probation, with each sentence to run concurrent to the above sentence.
According to court records a person called the Wal-Mart Super Center just before 7 p.m. on Sept. 8 and said there was a bomb on the roof. Wal-Mart employees had already begun evacuating the building, when the Lawrence Township Police Department arrived on the scene.
Police, then, conducted a search of the building and discovered a door, which is typically closed, was open to the roof. Bomb detection teams and K-9 units were brought in from both the Penn State Police Department and the Pennsylvania State Police in Hershey as a result. The grounds and building were searched with negative results.
Employees were later able to go back inside the store. At that time, items, which had not been checked out, were placed back on the shelves. However, store employees were forced to throw out any products that were damaged or spoiled. The total loss for thrown out items amounted to just over $1,100.
After the call was traced by police, Sgt. Mark Brooks, of the LTPD, called Sprint/Nextel on Sept. 9 in order to obtain more information from the cell phone number due to a delay in the Sprint Nextel/System, according to the affidavit of probable cause.
Brooks looked up several of the calls from the phone records and contacted the individuals for interviews. One interview revealed a friend was with Price on the day of the incident. He said Price was upset over paperwork he had received from the magistrate’s office about charges with Wal-Mart. He told police Price made the call to Wal-Mart and told the employee that a “bomb was on the roof.”
The retail theft charges stem from an incident at Wal-Mart as well.