The 16-year-old boy caught with a loaded gun at a Queens high school Thursday had threatened to shoot up his school after posting messages on social media about how he hated tests, prosecutors revealed Friday as he was arraigned, officials said.
The Benjamin Cardozo High School student was charged with criminal possession of a weapon and making a terroristic threat as an adolescent offender after cops found him toting a semi-automatic handgun in his backpack, one of 4,000 taken off the street this year, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters at a morning press conference.
The 9-millimeter Taurus GX4 – loaded with 13 rounds in the magazine – was seized just over two hours after the teen allegedly posted an ominous Instagram photo threatening that he was “Boutta Shoot the School Up.”
The teen also posted on the the site that his issues with tests prompted his actions.
“Essentially, he made a post on Instagram…threatening to shoot up the school because tests got him ‘tight.’ Meta, whose parent company Instagram, took the threat serious enough to where they informed the FBI and they provided the FBI with the phone number associated with the account,” said Assistant District Attorney Mirza Hadzic.
“The FBI forwarded that information to the NYPD because they also deemed it credible…They responded to the school.”
The swift investigation also led cops to the teen’s bedroom, where two additional 9-mm bullets were found that were compatible with the weapon, Tisch said.
The weapon was found to have been “purchased legally by a licensed firearm permit holder in South Carolina on January 9, 2025, making the time-to-crime 252 days,” the top cop said.
The Joint Firearms Task Force – which includes the NYPD and the ATF – has opened up an investigation to determine how the weapon made its way from South Carolina to Queens, she said.
The scare also prompted the installation of scanners at the high school, which did not have them beforehand, the commissioner added.
“Historically, this has not been a scanning school, but there was scanning this morning, and there will continue to be for the foreseeable future,” Tisch said.
During the student’s Friday afternoon arraignment, he sat handcuffed, wearing a tan hoodie and staring calmly ahead.
Hadzic alleged Julien came “dangerously close” to carrying out a school shooting by bringing a loaded gun to school.
Hadzic showed Supreme Court Judge Leigh Cheng a copy of the Instagram post, as well as a photo of the seized handgun.
“What makes the threat real and not a joke as the defendant claimed that it was, is that in his backpack that he had alongside with him there was a loaded firearm found in the backpack,” the prosecutor said. “That firearm contained an extended magazine….There were two additional rounds of ammunition found in the defendant’s bedroom inside a backpack as well.”
The teen’s attorney, Albert Dayan, requested that his client be held on $100,000 bail, arguing that the teen “doesn’t pose a danger,” and was cooperative, “polite,” and “timid.”
He pushed for the case to proceed in Family Court, while Hadzic argued the seriousness of the allegations merited Supreme Court prosecution.
“The FBI took it seriously, the NYPD took it seriously and we intend to take it seriously, too,” Hadzic said, as she requested that he be held without bail.
Cheng ultimately granted the teen $100,000 bail and a $250,000 partially secured bond.
While Cheng acknowledged the teen didn’t have prior police contact, he called the allegations “extremely severe” and issued an order of protection for the high school principal.
The boy’s father and uncle, who were in the courtroom, did not respond to The Post’s request for comment on the way out.
The teen will next appear in court Sept. 26.
If he is convicted and granted youthful offender status, he faces up to 1 1/3 to four years in prison, prosecutors said.
“As alleged, a 16-year-old student brought a loaded gun into his high school and threatened to do harm,” District Attorney Melinda Katz said in a statement. “Thanks to the quick action of our law enforcement partners at the NYPD and the FBI, a tragedy was averted. Gun violence has stolen too many young lives in our communities, and we are extremely grateful that this incident did not result in anyone being hurt or worse.”
Tisch, alongside Mayor Eric Adams, touted the recovered weapon as part of a bigger accomplishment for the NYPD so far in 2025.
“This year, we removed 4,000 illegal guns off our streets, and one of those guns was removed yesterday with a 16-year-old child that was in possession,” Adams said. “Stopping the flow of guns is something that we need our federal partners to help us [with], but what the police department is doing every day – zeroing in on illegal guns – the guns that we remove [are] saving lives.”
Tisch called the milestone the “result of persistent, highly proficient precision police work,” noting that for the past 8-and-a-half months, NYPD officers seized an average of 15 illegal guns per day.
In all of 2024, a total of 6,150 illegal guns were removed from the city’s streets, and 4,061 people were busted for gun possession, according to the year-end crime statistics.
And more than 23,700 illegal guns have been taken off the street since the start of Adams’ administration in 2022, the mayor said Friday.
“Those are 23,000 guns that are not going to be used to harm innocent people, take the lives of family members, kill or maim our police officers and countless numbers of people who are victimized by gun violence,” Hizzoner added.
The announcement came days after the mayor’s management report revealed that major crimes in New York City dropped nearly across the board, with six of seven major felony categories seeing marked declines.
Tisch and Adams on Friday credited targeted NYPD deployments in its notoriously high-crime “summer violence reduction zones,” gang takedowns, and “upstream solutions” such as programs for the youth and the formerly incarcerated for helping to stifle the violence.
The announcement came days after the mayor’s management report revealed that major crimes in New York City dropped nearly across the board, with six of seven major felony categories seeing marked declines.
Tisch and Adams on Friday credited targeted NYPD deployments in its notoriously high-crime “summer violence reduction zones,” gang takedowns, and “upstream solutions” such as programs for the youth and the formerly incarcerated for helping to stifle the violence.
“Each gun we take off the street has a positive and protective impact that ripples out across our city and uplifts every aspect of our lives, but every firearm taking off our street is only one part of the journey,” he said. “The criminal justice system is made up of several components. We need our lawmakers and our judges to do their job…It can’t continue to be a revolving door each time we have a shooting and see a long list of gun charges on a person who committed the shooting.”
“That sends a terrible message that we are not taking this violence seriously,” he added. “We’re doing so as police officers – as crisis management teams – we’re asking the other parts of this system [to] do your job. Let’s make sure dangerous people don’t go through the revolving cycle of being back on our street.”
