Hamilton High School parents calling for transparency after 17-year-old arrested for shooting threat

SUSSEX, Wis. (CBS 58) -- Some Hamilton High School parents are feeling uneasy about sending their kids to school this week, after a threat was made last week by a 17-year-old to “shoot up the school.”

Nolan Dwyer was arrested last week and charged with terrorist threats, court records say he signed a signature bond on Thursday, Nov. 13, and is no longer listed on the Waukesha County jail roster. 

According to a criminal complaint, police were dispatched to CESA in Pewaukee on Wednesday, Nov. 12, for a threat complaint. Dispatch was warned that a student made threats of a school shooting. 

The complaint says that a teacher at CESA told police that she heard Dwyer saying he was not going back to his district and if they made him, he would “shoot up the school.”

The teacher told him to stop talking about it, but Dwyer went on, saying he would “walk down the halls or into the office,” and “start shooting.”

The complaint says that initially, Dwyer told police he did say those things and that he “had a lot going on in his head.” Later, he told police he didn’t say those things and the teacher was lying. 

Police got in touch with Dwyer’s mother, who told them she did have a gun in the house, but that it was locked up, and her son did not have access to it. 

Heather Kenney has a daughter who is a sophomore at Hamilton and did not find out about the threat until her daughter saw a social media post on Sunday night. 

“She came to me and said Mom, why didn’t we get notified about this,” Kenney said. “This kid got arrested for saying he was going to shoot up our school.”

Kenney decided to keep her daughter out of school on Monday, because she had not heard anything from the district. 

“I ended up keeping my daughter home on Monday because we hadn’t heard anything about what was going on and we knew that he had been released into the community,” Kenney said. 

The Hamilton School District notified parents of the threat with a letter on Monday night, that talked about a 17-year-old being arrested, and how usually the parents would know right away, but this case was different because the student was not a current student at Hamilton. 

Kenney says her daughter was at school on Thursday and Friday last week because they did not know about the threat. 

“Our kids were left as potential victims in my opinion,” Kenney said. “I think that it’s really important that Sussex Hamilton get their crap together and put a policy in place not just if something is currently happening with a student but in the community itself when you have a threat.”