Wave of bogus threats hits schools in four states
More than 50 schools in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Massachusetts - including some in the Philadelphia region - were forced into evacuations and lockdowns Tuesday after school and police officials received threats generated by computer software, local and state authorities said.
More than 50 schools in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Massachusetts - including some in the Philadelphia region - were forced into evacuations and lockdowns Tuesday after school and police officials received threats generated by computer software, local and state authorities said.
All the threats were ultimately deemed false.
No officials would link the threats on Tuesday afternoon, with each saying they would, for now, be treated as regional, isolated incidents. Many also said they were forwarding information to the FBI.
All authorities did, however, acknowledge the similarities between the calls - almost all computer-generated, and each made by a caller who did not identify himself or herself.
In the Chichester School District, home to six Delaware County schools in Upper Chichester, Marcus Hook, and Lower Chichester, the superintendent's office received a call shortly before 10 a.m. warning of a bomb that was to detonate in 45 minutes, Superintendent Kathleen Sherman said.
More than 2,000 students were immediately evacuated and taken to locations throughout the community, she said.
Like many of the calls received across the Northeast, the call was masked by computer software, Upper Chichester police said.
The caller did not specify which school was targeted. All schools were inspected by police and determined safe around 2 p.m., police said.
"We did not know at the time," Sherman said, that similar threats were happening across the East Coast. "We just needed to make sure our students were safe."
In Bergen County, N.J., just across the Hudson River from New York City, at least 26 schools in nine districts received threats by phone starting shortly after 8:30, according to Anthony Cureton, a spokesman for the Bergen County Sheriff's Office.
Bergen police identified the call as coming from a recycled computer-generated phone number, Cureton said, which authorities traced back to Bakersfield, Calif. All schools were cleared without incident.
"In all of my years of policing," Cureton said, no threat so large and so simultaneous in his memory had been made against schools in the area.
Delaware state police also responded to three threats by phone early Tuesday, and Massachusetts state police reported responding to at least 15 bomb threats, including in Boston. In Massachusetts, some of the bomb threats were made through automated calls, police said.
In Delaware, the three calls were generated by computers, police said, though not all threats were bomb-specific.
At Long Neck Elementary in Millsboro, Del., a person using what sounded like a computer-generated message called and said he was armed on the roof and threatened to harm students and faculty. The school was placed on lockdown, and police ultimately cleared the school as safe.
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Staff writer Mari A. Schaefer contributed to this article.
