A 21-year-old Watsonville man was arrested early Wednesday on suspicion of threatening a mass shooting at an unspecified Pajaro Valley Unified School District graduation ceremony.
Moises Resendiz was charged with making criminal threats, a felony. He was booked into Santa Cruz County Jail and was being held without bail, according to jail records.
Detectives and the Santa Cruz County Anti-Crime Team served a search warrant in the 700 block of Rodriguez Street, where Resendiz was arrested. No firearms were found, and no guns are registered to him, Watsonville Police spokeswoman Erika Vazquez said.
“We want to assure the community that there are no active threats at this moment, and school safety remains a top priority for us,” Vazquez said.
In a prepared statement, PVUSD Superintendent Heather Contreras said “safety is our absolute priority, especially during this season of celebration.”
“We are grateful to the alert citizen who reported this post,” she said. “Threats against our schools are never a joke; they are crimes that we and our law enforcement partners will always take seriously.”
Contreras added that the district will maintain a heightened security presence at all graduation events.
Police said Resendiz admitted posting the threatening social media comment to “rage-bait” the community, a term used to describe content intended to provoke anger.
A citizen reported the threat to Watsonville police on May 9. Detectives launched an investigation that day and gathered information and evidence to obtain the search warrant, which was served Wednesday.
“We needed to wait in order to make sure we didn’t interfere with the investigation and wouldn’t be releasing premature information,” Vazquez told the Pajaronian.
She added that police take all threats made on social media seriously and that such threats will be fully investigated “without exception.”
