Lockdowns, evacuations as campuses react to scares
Threats and suspicious reports disrupt schools in nine states in the aftermath of the Virginia shootings.
From the Associated Press
April 18, 2007
AUSTIN, TEXAS Campus threats forced lockdowns and evacuations at schools in nine states Tuesday, a day after a Virginia Tech student's shooting rampage killed 33 people.
One threat in Louisiana and another in Montana directly mentioned the massacre in Virginia, and others were reports of suspicious activity in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Dakota, South Dakota and Michigan.
In Louisiana, parents picked up hundreds of students from Bogalusa's high school and middle school amid reports that a man had been arrested Tuesday morning, accused of threatening a mass killing in a note that alluded to the Virginia slayings.
Superintendent Jerry Payne said both schools were locked down and police had arrested a 53-year-old man who allegedly had made the threat in a note he gave to a student headed to the private Bowling Green School in Franklinton.
A Great Falls, Mont., high school was locked down Tuesday after a threatening note was found in a girls' bathroom.
A student found the note about 12:15 p.m. on a toilet paper dispenser. It said "the shooting would start at Great Falls High at 12:30 and it would be worse than Virginia Tech," Assistant Superintendent Dick Kuntz said. He said it was a hoax.
In Rapid City, S.D., schools were locked down after receiving reports of a man with a gun in a parking lot at Central High. The high school students were taken to the nearby Rushmore Plaza Civic Center, where parents were allowed to pick up their children.
In Austin, authorities evacuated buildings at St. Edward's University after a threatening note was found, a school official said.
Police secured the campus perimeter and were searching the buildings, university spokeswoman Mischelle Amador said.
Seven buildings at North Dakota State University in Fargo were evacuated after a duffel bag was found outside a bus shelter in the main part of the campus.
In Bloomfield Hills, Mich., police attributed a 30-minute lockdown at the exclusive Cranbrook Schools complex to jittery nerves after the Virginia slayings.
School officials called police after parents and students reported seeing a 6-foot-tall man in a skirt, high heels, lipstick and a blond wig near a school drop-off area outside Cranbrook's Kingswood Upper School, Lt. Paul Myszenski said. Police were unable to find anyone meeting the description.
At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, officials ordered three campus administration buildings evacuated for almost two hours Tuesday morning in response to a telephone bomb threat. The city's bomb squad searched the buildings but found nothing, campus spokesman Chuck Cantrell said.
In Arizona, classes were canceled at Estrella Mountain Community College in Avondale, a suburb of Phoenix, after a note threatening a shooting was delivered by inter-campus mail.
Avondale police searched the campus, but nothing was found, said Amy Boulton, a police spokeswoman.
A scare at the University of Oklahoma at Norman started with a report of a man spotted on campus carrying a suspicious object, officials said.
The man was carrying an umbrella, not a weapon, and he later identified himself to authorities, University of Oklahoma President David Boren said.
