Officials take hoax threats seriously
Texting from a classroom inside the locked-down Heights High School classroom, Nancy King’s ninth-grade son told his mom he heard a rumor that a freshman was walking around campus shooting people.
Classmates were crying, he told his mom, but he said he was safe and feeling OK.
Within a few hours Tuesday afternoon, shaken families at the 2,400-student Houston ISD campus learned the incident was a hoax. But the trauma that students, staff and parents endured during the threat triggers trauma that can have lasting effects, according to experts.
“To know that there was no violence doesn’t change the fact that I was terrified,” said Jennifer C. Genovese, graduate program director at Syracuse University’s School of Social Work.
“That doesn’t change that my heart was racing, a kid wet their pants.”
Police officers conducted two sweeps of Heights High School after receiving a false report that a gunman had shot 10 people in a room, and they found nothing, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner said.
The campus was one of many across the country this week to experience a hoax shooting, and safety officials agree these threats shouldn’t be taken lightly, even with the unintended psychological harm that might come from police response. In Klein ISD, students at one campus were sent home following a bomb threat, and in Fort Bend ISD, a campus was put in lockdown after a student was found to have an airsoft gun.
The mass shooting in Uvalde last May that left 19 elementary students and two teachers dead also put law enforcement — as well as families — across the nation in a heightened state of anxiety about school safety, said Kathy Martinez-Prather, director of the Texas School Safety Center at Texas State University. That means that police are responding at a high level, although the tactics will differ depending on the situation.
“I really emphasize taking every threat seriously and not becoming complacent,” MartinezPrather said. “It can sometimes be easy to do that when you see such an influx. It is so critical to stay vigilant.”
Research shows that if someone is going to commit a mass shooting there is a good chance they’ll drop hints beforehand. An analysis of 170 perpetrators of mass shootings found that nearly half leaked their intention to act violently, with 44 percent of them leaking specific details of their plans, according to a 2021 study from the Journal of the American Medical Association, a peer-reviewed medical journal.
A new trend
For decades, schools have experienced bomb threats, but this many shooting threats — happening at the same time — is unusual, said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers.
“For false bomb threats we have those better figured out, but with a false active shooter situation we’re not there at all,” Canady said, “because we’re dealing with this new trend.”
Around the same time of the false alarm at Heights High School, similar incidences broke out across the state and the country. Eanes ISD, near Austin, tweeted out that they received an “anonymous phone call with a vague threat,” and out of an abundance of caution asked students and staff not to stay in classrooms and not move about the building.
The school district wrote in a statement about a dozen similar threats were launched across the state on Tuesday. Officials with the FBI Houston office said they were aware of multiple “swatting” incidents in which reports of an active shooter were made. Other places that received false threats include Waco, Los Angeles and Madera, Calif.
Aldine ISD officials confirmed they also received two campus threats this week that were thoroughly investigated and proved to be noncredible.
And the Houston area saw a scare on Wednesday, when a student threatened Klein Forest High School in the Spring area with a bomb, Klein ISD announced Thursday morning. The school was evacuated and the student was put in police custody, but it upended the day, while students were sent home early and police searched the campus.
In recent years, these threats have likely become more prevalent with the rise of social media, said Zachary Kaufman, the codirector of the Criminal Justice Institute at the University of Houston.
“Social media and (cell) phones have enabled such hoaxes to be made easier, quicker,” Kaufman said, “and seemingly more genuine than ever.”
King and her son, a freshman, watched the news at home Tuesday night. He opened up and shared that while he downplayed his feelings in the moment, he actually was scared, his mother said.
During lockdown, he found a spot at the front of the classroom, because he determined that was where it seemed least likely for a bullet to hit. When police came into the classrooms with their guns, he also wondered what might happen if they falsely accused him and started shooting.
“It just broke my heart,” King said. “I wish there was a way to verify that sort of thing before they frighten students and have them holed up for four hours in their rooms.”
Quicker response
That might be a difficult charge: HPD’s Finner and school safety expert Ken Trump both said officers are going to prioritize keeping children safe, and then work to get out information as fast as they can.
King said she heard multiple rumors on social media about what was occurring in the school — all of them concerning — before she arrived at the school and heard from a police officer that no one had been found with a gun.
While some parents complained about the school district’s communication about the hoax, HISD spokesman Luis Morales said notifications went out to parents 23 minutes after the district became aware of the situation — “quicker than we have before.”
Still, many parents were aware longer after receiving texts from their students inside the school and from hearing law enforcement notifications of a potential active shooter.
That type of actual exposure to the threat of gun violence can both result in fear, anxiety, anger, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, Genovese said. “We live in a social climate where the threat of violence has become commonplace,” she said.
The anxiety or other issues that arise could become short- or long-term problems depending on someone’s age, developmental stage and history of trauma, said Genovese.
Melissa Brymer, director of Terrorism and Disaster Programs at the UCLA-Duke National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, said that children who have previously survived a shooting would likely be reminded of their past trauma during a “hoax” and experience serious trauma all over again.
“It’s really important for folks like me to support those communities, and help reassure them that it was a hoax and not a true threat,” she said.
For students and parents who haven’t experienced previous trauma, anxiety might be more short-lived, Brymer added.
King said that it took her several days to come down from her nervousness and fear. She might take her son to a counselor to “vent,” she said. She worries about her and her son’s reactions to potential future hoaxes, and she never wants to repeat the anxiety she felt while waiting for confirmation.
“I don’t want this to go away without them letting us know who called, why they called, and what they’re doing to prevent this from happening again,” she said.