Mount Pleasant man arrested on terroristic threat charges involving Daingerfield grocery store

 

 

By SONYA ROBERTS-WOODS
A mid-morning 911 call has landed one suspect in jail charged with terroristic threat.
At 10:12 a m. April 9, dispatch for the Daingerfield Police Department and Morris County Sheriff’s Office received a call indicating there was a bomb inside the Brookshire’s store located at 609 Linda Drive. According to Police Chief Tracey Climer, store managers were immediately instructed to clear the entire store of all employees and customers—some 50 individuals.
“Once we had the store cleared, we determined that there wasn’t a bomb,” Chief Climer explained. “We then watched the store’s video and decided to interview an employee and a civilian (customer) present inside at the time the call was made. We cleared the employee pretty quickly.”
From there, police officers “pinged” the call and discovered it was now a non-working phone. Several hours later at just after 1 p.m., a person of interest from the initial investigation returned to the store and was detained. That same person was in possession of the phone used to make the initial 911 call. A subsequent investigation determined the owner of the phone based on the IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) number.
Tron Covin Pate, 36, of Mount Pleasant, was arrested on the threat charge, a second-degree felony and transported to the Morris County Jail. Once there, Pate intentionally coughed on an officer and indicated he had Coronavirus. An additional charge of terroristic threat of a peace officer, a third-degree felony, was then added due to the then local and state disaster declaration.