Mother released in threat case following guilty plea
A Cecil Township woman was released from jail Monday following her guilty pleas on charges stemming from a comment she made to a therapist out of frustration with officials at a Canon-McMillan school.
Amanda Jarosh, 39, had been in jail since Nov. 9, when township police filed misdemeanor charges of making a terroristic threat and disorderly conduct.
In a deal with prosecutors, she entered the pleas to both counts before Washington County Common Pleas Judge Valarie Costanzo.
Jarosh received 2 to 23 months in Washington County jail. She was released with credit for time served. She’ll spend the balance of her jail sentence on parole, with the year following on probation.
Attorney Jeff Ries, who represented Jarosh, said he was confident his client “will be successful on probation.”
“I think she’ll prove this to be a one-off incident,” Ries added. “She’s learned from her mistake, and she looks forward to the chance to prove herself.”
Before her arrest, Jarosh was in a dispute with Hills-Hendersonville Elementary School over an issue involving the education of one of her children. In her anger, Jarosh, while speaking to a therapist who was working with the child, said she was ready to “shoot up” the school.
The therapist’s supervisor told the school, which reported the incident to police.
Detective James Brose, who filed the charges, is the husband of Hills-Hendersonville Principal Shelley Brose.
Monday’s proceeding was the second plea hearing in the case.
Jarosh had agreed to plead guilty to the threat charge on Feb. 27 in exchange for 1 to 23 months in jail, with credit for time served. Costanzo’s acceptance of the deal would have allowed for Jarosh’s release that day.
That proposal was in line with state guidelines, but Canon-McMillan officials – including Superintendent Michael Daniels, who testified that day – objected to it.
Costanzo rejected the plea deal, telling Assistant District Attorney Nathan Michaux to confer with district officials and township police and come up with a new offer on which they could all agree.
During that hearing, the judge also chastised Michaux for not notifying police and officials of Canon-McMillan School District before withdrawing felony charges that police had filed four days after bringing the first case.
Township police Sgt. John Holt Jr. had filed the aggravated assault charges, which stemmed from similar comments Jarosh allegedly had made to a neighbor in a conversation over private messages on Facebook the day prior to her arrest.
The neighbor initially dismissed the comments but relayed them to police after seeing the first case in the news, and police added the felony charges to the ones Jarosh already faced.
Michaux explained during last week’s hearing that those charges weren’t supported by the law, and the decision he made in January not to pursue them was a matter of ethics.
Jarosh, a mother of three, doesn’t have any guns in her household. She has no prior criminal record.
On Monday, Michaux said the parties in the case had agreed that Jarosh had served her minimum jail sentence.
Costanzo ordered Jarosh to be under the supervision of the county adult probation office’s “impact unit” – which requires more frequent contact and enforces more intensive terms with those it oversees – with the possibility for her to be moved to the less strict “general probation” at some point.
Among the other terms of the sentence, Jarosh is barred from district events and property, unless she receives written permission from the superintendent.
Costanzo said the terms she was imposing would not supersede the notice the district already had given to Jarosh that includes similar instructions to stay away from its grounds and functions it sponsors.
Costanzo did include one caveat that in emergencies Jarosh could be on the district property “if and only if escorted by a police officer.”
“That’s only if there’s an emergency,'” Costanzo added.