Graffiti threat spurs school lockdown

While thousands of students walked out of school Wednesday in California and across the country to demand stricter gun laws, San Leandro High’s protest was preempted by a graffiti threat to shoot up the school.

The threat sent the high school into a three-hour lockdown, and officials have canceled classes scheduled for Thursday.

Administrators for the San Leandro Unified School District notified police at about 9:30 a.m. of graffiti that said the school would be the site of a shooting on Thursday, said San Leandro Police Lt. Isaac Benabou.

The school immediately went into its lockdown protocol, district Superintendent Mike McLaughlin said, and the grounds were searched. Nothing suspicious was found, but police and the district agreed to call off classes Thursday as a precaution.

Dillon Washington, a 16-year-old sophomore, said in a text message that he and his fellow students were “pretty scared” as they remained in their classroom for several hours. He said police, FBI and SWAT were at the school and many students had heard that guns were found on campus.

However, police confirmed that the only alarming thing found on the campus was the graffiti threat.

“There were no guns found,” Benabou said. “As you know, students are in classrooms, they talk amongst each other, messages go out, messages are lost in translation, social media plays a part, but I can tell you no guns were found.”

San Leandro police sent out an alert confirming the lockdown at 11:10 a.m, almost two hours after the threat was reported.

A photo making its way around social media showed the threat was written in marker pen on what appeared to be the wall of a toilet stall. The message read: “I’m shooting the school tommorow [sic] at 1 I’m sick of this s* Better not come F* this place”.

In recent weeks, several schools across the Bay Area have gone into lockdown after similar messages were found on school property or sent through social media.

The response to Wednesday’s threat and the decision to cancel classes the next day underscored the comments of many students who left school Wednesday to protest gun violence and bring attention to how unsafe they feel at school.

When the San Leandro students were released at 1 p.m., many marched off the campus and resumed the call for stricter gun laws.