Pasco Sheriff Chris Nocco said Tuesday that his deputies arrested a 12-year-old boy — as an adult — on allegations that he made an online threat against Seven Springs Middle School.

The boy faces a charge of making a written threat to kill, which is a second-degree felony. The Tampa Bay Times is withholding the boy's identity because of his age. He threatened students at his own school in New Port Richey through the social networking video app musical.ly.

The threat said: "Hello I am going to kill kids at SEVEN SPRINGS MIDDLE SCHOOL on Friday the 7th of October 2016 GET READY 6th graders for your worst day and your last day." The post was made under the account "@clouning_around," which had 32 followers.

When parents discovered the threat, they called the Sheriff's Office on Monday night. Nocco said investigators tracked the account to the 12-year-old and that the boy admitted making the threat.

The boy said he thought it was funny, Nocco said. However, the sheriff said his agency does not believe the 12-year-old planned to carry out the threat or had the means to do so. Still, the sheriff said at a news conference Tuesday that his agency decided to arrest the child as an adult.

"If you threaten one of our schools, you threaten people in our community, that line in the sand is drawn," Nocco said. "We're going to protect our citizens."

Common sense, Nocco said, leads deputies to believe the boy's actions were connected to a wave of clown incidents across the country, most of which have turned out to be hoaxes. But the sheriff said he didn't see the boy's clown-related social media threat as just a joke.

"He could've had a picture of the sky with clouds in the background, and a beautiful picture," Nocco said. "You write 'Hello, I am going to kill kids at Seven Springs Middle School,' you're going to be charged with a second-degree felony."

But it's not up to the sheriff to try the boy as an adult. It's up to the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office.

"It would have to be a very egregious situation to charge a 12-year-old child as an adult," Chief Assistant State Attorney Bruce Bartlett said.

Although Bartlett said he didn't know all of the facts of the case yet, he said this "doesn't appear to be the type of situation where we go forward under those circumstances."

That decision, he said, would ultimately be made by State Attorney Bernie McCabe.

The nation has been inundated with reports of menacing clowns, some real but most hoaxes. Each incident inspires more copycats and thus more arrests. Tuesday's arrest was the most serious in a recent spate of clown reports in the Tampa Bay region.

Last week, a Largo High School student reported that a man in a clown mask chased her at her bus stop. She escaped unharmed, but the incident is still being investigated. The Pasco County School District on Friday sent an alert to its schools about clown-related threats.

On Monday, University of South Florida police said it was investigating a report of a clown seen running near the athletic fields of the Tampa campus. Officers found no one.

The St. Petersburg Police Department said Tuesday it had received five calls about clown-related threats connected to Gibbs, Northeast and St. Petersburg high schools and Meadowlawn Middle after a picture of a clown peeking out behind a tree was circulated on social media.

Some calls specifically mentioned a clown's intent to "shoot up" a school:

"I have an AK47. I'm going to shoot up the school," the message read. When asked which school, the clown said, "I don't know, some random a- - school."

No arrests have been made, St. Petersburg police spokesman Rick Shaw said, and no threats have been deemed credible.

"So far we've had nothing credible as far as any clown sightings here in St. Pete or St. Pete schools," he said. "Other than people are just perpetuating the problem by claiming clowns are going to do this or clowns are going to do that."

Pinellas County School District spokeswoman Lisa Wolf said officials also were aware of rumored threats made against Seminole and Clearwater high schools, Clearwater Intermediate and Clearwater Fundamental Middle but determined they were not credible. "They're all over the place," Wolf said.

Times staff writers Laura C. Morel and Claire McNeill contributed to this report. Contact LaVendrick Smith at lsmith@tampabay.com.