Earlier this month, a student at my daughter’s public high school found a pile of .22 caliber bullets on the floor of a boys’ bathroom. A day before, a threatening note was discovered in the same restroom, inside a stall. On top of the tissue dispenser. In February, three similar notes were found, three days in a row, in the same place. All talked of bombs.
When the bullets surfaced, FBI agents were called to the school to assist local police officers. The next day, someone dropped another handwritten note at the top of a stairwell. Then, after a $10,000 reward was announced, someone emailed a seventh threat to the organization that receives the tips. Twice this week, a person sent intimidating messages to individual students’ telephones. One was two paragraphs long. It said that the situation is “not a hoax,” we will see, but has been “building.” Finally, today, while writing this piece, another round of messages hit students’ phones.
When something happens, the school administrators send a text message to parents. They started doing this after the first round of notes. Numbers show up on the screen and you know there is trouble. We rush to the school to pick up our kids, in pajamas, in the middle of work. My stomach pangs when the phone rings. The morning of the bullets, it was my mom. I should tell her not to call.
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