A Louisville man was arrested Thursday afternoon after confessing to tweeting messages related to burning down Trinity High School.
St. Matthews Police confirmed 29-year-old Thor Wiljanen was arrested and will be charged with a second-degree terroristic threat, which is a class d felony.
“At some point today, a local Louisville attorney reached out to our primary investigator on this case, detective Mark Richardson, and said he wanted to set a meeting today and that he would have an individual in his office he thought Detective Richardson might want to talk to,” St. Matthews Police Major Tony Cobaugh said.
“The conversation was opened up by Detective Richardson and basically, with the attorney present, did all the important legal things with preparing for an interview, interrogation and was able to obtain a confession from this particular individual.”
St. Matthews police had been investigating tweets that mentioned burning down Trinity High School if Purdue head coach Jeff Brohm did not accept the Louisville coaching vacancy. Brohm, who attended and played football at Trinity High School, announced Wednesday that he was not taking the Louisville opening.
School officials at Trinity announced Wednesday afternoon that classes would be cancelled for Thursday because of the threats and police were investigating the claims. The school said it would reopen on Friday.
Wiljanen, with his attorney present, confessed to writing the tweets and has been charged and taken to the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections. A judge will determine if he is eligible for bond, and what the dollar amount is if he is deemed eligible.
If he remains in custody or posts bail, Wiljanen will be arraigned in court on Friday at 9 a.m. in Jefferson County.
While the threat is being taken very seriously by local police, school officials and the FBI, Wiljanen is expected to provide a defense that the tweets were meant to be humorous and were not intended to be made as a threat.
“It was in no way a threat,” Wiljanen’s attorney, Ted Shouse, told the Courier Journal in Lafayette, Indiana. “It was an attempt at humor, and the community and the school were never in any danger. It was never a threat.”
Cobaugh said he did not the tweets as humorous.
“In the world we live in now, in the America that we live in now, any sane-thinking police executive and any sane-thinking school executive that would think that was an attempt at satire would not agree,” Cobaugh said. “We live in a world where we have no choice but to check these people out and if they’ve done what they’ve done, they deserve to be charged and face a jury of their peers or a judge.
“They can say whatever they want to say about parody, satire, or it’s just a joke, well, it’s not to local law enforcement leadership and it’s not to school leadership.”