A Mississauga family devastated by emailed death threats sent from the children’s school last year is now hoping Google can help end their ongoing nightmare. But it’s unclear if the cyber-juggernaut will cooperate.

Peel police Sgt. Rob Higgs confirmed to the Star Wednesday that “information has been requested of Google by way of a search warrant.”

Higgs said Peel Police began their own attempts to get information about the email account shortly after the threats were received. The information now being requested from Google’s headquarters in California involves the federal government, he said.

“We have not received any indication that Google is being anything less than cooperative. We have not been advised of when we can expect to receive the results of this search.”

Asked if Google will co-operate, a spokesperson for the company stated: “Like all law-abiding companies, we comply with valid legal requests. We take user privacy very seriously, and whenever we receive a request we make sure it meets both the letter and spirit of the law before complying.”

Ashoak Grewal received four threatening emails from a Google gmail account between late September and mid-October last year. They stated he and his family would be killed and his young daughter would be sexually assaulted before she died.

Shockingly, police determined the emails had been sent from Oscar Peterson Elementary School, and Grewal said police did not believe it was a student that sent the emails.

Grewal, a teacher at a different school in the Peel District School Board, had been involved in a racially charged incident involving a teacher at Oscar Peterson while his children were attending there. In 2010 the board commissioned an independent third-party report, which revealed a history of race-based issues among the staff themselves — some of whom were described in the report as being “resistant” to change as the ethnic demographics of the community had evolved.

Higgs says police can’t speculate whether the culprit is a student or a teacher, and the police will not put a number to the size of its list of potential suspects. However, during a court hearing between the Peel board and Grewal in January, when the family was trying to have their children returned to the school, board lawyer Roy Filion pointed out that police had narrowed their list of suspects to 16 staff at the school.

“We’re very frustrated that it’s been over 14 months since we got the first (threatening) email,” Grewal says, at his Mississauga home. His children now attend different schools. Their dad says their lives have been shattered.

“On an Internet crime, with all the information that’s available about who set up the account — the name, address, when it was used, other identifying information — how can there be no charges laid yet?”

He says police informed him “recently” about the search warrant filed to Google in the United States, where the company is headquartered in Mountain View, California. He says he was told there are “many layers” to file such a warrant.

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Police would not say when the warrant was initiated or when it was received by Google.

“There are thousands of people in this community who have been supporting us,” says Grewal, adding that while the wait is crippling, he understands what the police have to do. “Everyone just wants to see an arrest.”

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