A federal judge denied a request for pre-trial release from an Oxford teenager accused of lodging bomb threats or conspiring to lodge bomb threats at universities, schools and federal offices in more than a dozen states.
Ashton Lundeby, 16, asked last week for a judge to reconsider a detention order, saying he needed dental work and schooling that he could only get outside the Indiana youth detention center where he has been jailed since March.
Robert L. Miller, a chief judge in the Indiana northern district federal court in South Bend, Ind., entered his order today, saying the reasons requested by Lundeby's public defender did not warrant a new hearing about the matter.
Lundeby's case was a brief sensation among bloggers after his mother made false claims that he had been detained under the Patriot Act.
In indictments issued last week by an Indiana federal grand jury, prosecutors accused Lundeby, 16, of being a celebrity and a central role-player in an Internet prankster world in which bomb threats were made to universities, high schools and federal offices in 2008 and 2009.
Prosecutors allege that in elaborate hoaxes performed live and occasionally for money before selected Internet audiences, Lundeby and unnamed co-conspirators used numerous pseudonyms and elaborate computer gaming techniques to transmit threats and then watch live through video surveillance and stationed Webcams as law enforcement teams responded.
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