Local News in Brief : Student Must Stand Trial
A teen-ager who held about 70 San Gabriel High School students hostage at gunpoint was ordered Tuesday to stand trial after prosecutors played his tape-recorded confession.
Jeff Lyne Cox, 18, of San Gabriel, told police he had planned the April 26 incident of “urban terrorism” for several weeks and intended to “demand $1 million in ransom and use the money to go out of the country, perhaps to Rio de Janeiro,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Susan Wondries said.
“He said he didn’t want to kill anyone unless he had to and if he had to, he would do it in a humanitarian style,” the prosecutor said. “He said he would put a pillowcase over their heads and shoot them in the back of their heads.”
No students were injured in the incident. Two shots were fired, however, before several classmates overpowered Cox, a former honor student at the school who had stopped attending classes in recent months.
He was charged with 10 counts of false imprisonment, four counts of assault with a deadly weapon and one count of burglary.
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