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San Jose Mercury News, Thursday morning, October 5, 1989
"COPS GOT HIS NUMBER"
"Teen accused of harassment calls via computer"
The 16-year-old computer enthusiast loved to call people on the telephone
and speaking through a voice synthesizer, talked like the devil. Over
time, the boy harassed police departments from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to
Hayward, and managed to rack up an estimated $170,000 in illegal calls,
authorities said. In one day last year, the Los Angeles-area youth, whom
police would not identify by his real name, made 67 calls to the Hayward
Police Department. And in a Los Angeles County town, dispatchers were
distracted durning several emergencies one evening while they answered his
crank calls for five hours. But try as they might, neither law
enforcement officials nor an investigator at one telephone company that
was paying the bills could figure out who was doing it. "He was, to be
frank about it, a pain in the ass," said Stan McClurg, a Cedar Rapids
detective." "He would call people and simply harass them." Then in
early March, Kent, as he liked to call himself, spent five hours chatting
with dispatchers at the Hayward Police Department. It was long enough
for authorities to trace the call all the way to his home in San Gabriel.
When police arrived that night, they found the teen-ager in bed with his
Commodore 64, talking on the telephone. Police say they can prove the
youth made about $2000 worth of fraudulent calls. When he is arraigned
Oct, 16 he will be charged with fraud and making two harrassing phone
calls, four bomb threats and interfering with the Hayward Police and Los
Angeles Sheriff's Departments. Sgt. Kammer of the Los Angeles Sheriffs
Department said the boy probably got the long-distance calling codes from
a computer bulletin board, along with numbers that would get him into the
phone mail systems of large companies. such as Sears Roebuck. Once
inside, he ran thousands of combinations of numbers through his computer,
leaving it on all day while he was away at school, police said. When he
hit on codes that would get him into employees phone mail, he would
retrieve their messages and leave devilish ones of his own. "The kid
was very, very bright kid, and he was very bored," Kammer said. "He sat
up all night doing these things."