By AJ Dome
CSU-Pueblo students Charles “Evan” Montoya, 19, and Simon Budisavljevic, 18, were arrested Wednesday, March 9, after they admitted to their involvement with a bomb threat March 8.
The two freshmen were arrested for the false reporting of explosives, a low-level felony. The secondary charge was interference with staff and faculty or students of an educational institution, a misdemeanor.
In a press release, Cora Zalatel, CSU-Pueblo’s executive director of external affairs, said Montoya and Budisavljevic have been suspended from the university until their court hearings.
Montoya and Budisavljevic were identified to be the students who wrote the threat, according to the police affidavits obtained by Pueblo Chieftain reporters.
Budisavljevic was the student who came forward about the threat when he submitted an anonymous tip to Crime Stoppers, because “they were afraid to come forward about being responsible for the threat.”
The students were found, and later submitted themselves to voluntary questioning by authorities. During questioning, they admitted to writing the threat that was found in a second-floor classroom of the Occhiato University Center.
After attending a “women’s awareness” meeting in the OUC for free nachos, Montoya and Busisavljevic found an empty classroom where they first joked about writing a threat. Then they decided to write it, Montoya said in the affidavits.
He then said they “did not know why they wrote the threat,” according to the affidavits.
Montoya confessed that he drew a stick figure on the flip chart, and Budisavljevic wrote the words of the threat, which said:
“Plan: (underlined once)
Operation bomb CSU-Pueblo
Wednesday, March 9
+ we will shoot everybody (underlined twice).”
The two students wrote the threat as a joke, they said. The affidavits also said they exchanged text messages later that day, which said, “Dude, I still can’t believe we got the whole school goin’ crazy haha.”
During a press conference last week, Sheriff Kirk Taylor said deputies found no evidence that “there were any means for them to carry out the plan.”
On campus, security presence has shrunk now that the threat is gone, but Taylor’s deputies will continue to patrol throughout the day.
