Criminal charges filed against 2, dismissed last week
Two USC students were charged criminally out of six who were referred to Student Conduct after residents reported hearing “multiple booms” outside of Columbia Hall earlier this year, according to documents the university released Tuesday.
Carson Wolfe, a first-year biochemistry and molecular biology student of Roebuck, S.C., and Tyler Young, a first-year undeclared student, of Spartanburg, S.C., who are both 18, had been charged with possessing an “overpressure device,” according to arrest warrants. Those charges were dismissed in a preliminary hearing Friday, according to court documents.
What sanctions the Office of Student Conduct mandated for the six students is not publicly available, because that information is protected under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), said university spokesman Wes Hickman.
“They have been dealt with through the university’s Office of Student Conduct appropriately,” Hickman said.
According to the Office of the Registrar, Wolfe still attends the university, and Young withdrew this semester. Information about the other four students was not available; Hickman did not release their names to The Daily Gamecock, citing FERPA.
The six were making “homemade explosive-type devices made from plastic bottles,” an expanded incident report released Tuesday said, and officers found the remnants of bottles outside by the residence hall’s northeast corner, which faces the building’s parking lot near Pendleton Street.
They found three plastic bottles that had been exploded and a fourth that appeared melted, according to the report.
Information about what kind of devices the group made was redacted in the police report, but investigators found bottles filled partially with unidentified substances.
“Details on the manufacturing of destructive devices is protected for public safety reasons,” Hickman wrote later in an email response.
Officers also found a bottle with a substance in a trash can in a fourth-floor common room and “possible print evidence” on third- and fourth-floor common area windows, and a Columbia Hall resident showed police tweets that “contained the phrase ‘making bombs’” and showed pictures of the process, according to the expanded report.
Police were called to the Barnwell Street residence hall twice on the night of the incident after multiple residents reported hearing what they thought were fireworks, according to the report.
The first came around 11 p.m. the night of Oct. 22, but officers didn’t find signs of anything amiss. They came again just before 1 a.m. the next morning, after USC and Columbia police received multiple reports from residents and found evidence of activity.
USC police had previously declined to reveal details of the incident as they pursued the prospect of prosecution.
Read the incident report about the October explosions below