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Cocoa, FL - A woman has been vindicated after a year-long investigation regarding a bomb threat at a Florida high school that she was charged with.
Anaya Smith and her sister, Andrea Johnson, have been insisting for over a year that the bomb threat that contained profanity-laden language on Cocoa High School's answering machine was not made by Smith.
Neither was the recorded phone number hers.
On Wednesday, Smith and Johnson heard the message for the first time and reacted by stating, "I don't sound anything like that."
Last year, after sweeping the campus, Cocoa police attributed the threat to an angry caller who complained about her son not receiving all the food he wanted at lunch.
The newly-released video captures the caller saying, "you better [expletive] run that damn cafeteria better or I'm going to slap the [expletive] out of your dumb [expletive]."
Smith and Johnson believed the voice on the recording sounded like a man.
In an arrest report, Officer Michael Cox noted that the phone number was Smith's listed number with the school, and he recognized Smith's voice because he had numerous encounters with her.
However, Smith said that she never met Cox in her life.
On Monday, the state attorney's office confirmed that it does not believe it can prove that the voice on the recording belonged to Smith.
Consequently, all charges have been dropped.
The statement released by the 18th Circuit State Attorney's Office reads "as the State began preparing this case for trial, evidence supporting the positive identification of the defendant's voice was insufficient to overcome the anticipated defense that another unidentified individual had left the electronic message. Further, the conditional nature of the threat presented several legal challenges the State to was unlikely to overcome. Without a good faith belief that the crimes could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt at trial, prosecutors were legally and ethically obliged to abandon the prosecution."
A spokesperson for the police department stated they stand by their investigation.