Columbine anniversary: Out of public view, school shooting threats a routine reality

Educators, police have refined responses to alarming behavior, to distinguish between serious threats and mouthing off, and avoid needless mass panic.

SAN JOSE — On Thursday, a student at a charter school in East San Jose emailed a teacher, threatening to “shoot up the school” if he didn’t get good grades.

Several days before, in South San Jose, a 12-year-old boy, fuming over being bullied at school, sat in the principal’s office and muttered aloud how he wanted to “burn down this school and blow it up.”

In each case, police went to the student’s home, checked for any access to guns and determined that the threat was empty. The students were left in the care of school administrators, who offered counseling services.

Two decades after the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, such threats have become an everyday occurrence in schools around the country. Most turn out to be baseless. Some do not: Witness the troubling case of Sol Pais, who FBI officials said was “infatuated with Columbine” and whose broad threats, combined with her purchase of a shotgun, prompted officials in the Denver area to close hundreds of schools. After a massive manhunt, Pais, 18, was found dead Wednesday, reportedly from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, on a trail about 50 miles west of Columbine.

But for every mass school shooting — or threatened shooting —  there are far more threats that are handled, and defused, by authorities before they ever reach the public’s attention.

San Jose police Sgt. Sean Morgan, one of SJPD’s chief school liaisons for the 10th largest city in the country, said his department receives reports of threats to schools as frequently as three times a week, and on a few occasions twice in a day. Each must be investigated.

“Saying, ‘I’m going to shoot up a school’ these days is the same as saying you have a bomb on a plane,” Morgan said. “It’s taken seriously no matter how much it might seem like a joke.”

Morgan said the threats are often posted on social media, made by students playing Fortnite or delivered personally to  classmates or teachers. They observe no geographical or economic boundaries, coming from schools all over the city.

“This happens everywhere,” Morgan said.

In the vast majority of cases, the threats turn out to be a cry for help or, increasingly, a prank or a way of blowing off steam.

“In a lot of cases, it’s just a one-time, one-off event,” said Chris Funk, superintendent of the East Side Union High School District in San Jose, which has the largest high school enrollment in Northern California. “Once the light was shined on them and the police were involved and the parents were involved, that’s the end of that story.”

He added, “I think we’re ahead of the game in prevention, but we still have a lot of work to do.”

In at least one case last year, the threat of violence was more serious, said Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Marisa McKeown.

On a spring day in 2018, a man newly out of high school texted his girlfriend, musing about suicide and saying he admired Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. The former student followed up with a message saying he wanted to “shoot up the school” she attended. The girlfriend knew he had a homemade rifle and a handgun.

Her mother grew concerned and reported it to San Jose police, who obtained a restraining order allowing law enforcement officers to seize the man’s weapons. Police decided to approach him outside of his home, on the street. The tension dissipated quickly. The man volunteered to turn in his weapons, while they investigated and assessed how serious he was about the threat. It turns out, McKeown said, that the man “was just spouting off to his girlfriend.”

J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist based in San Diego, said in cases where students exhibit worrisome signs, the response is best handled by a threat assessment team composed of a senior school administrator, a school resource officer, a counselor and a faculty member, who develop a management plan for a student. Depending on the case, he said, the best intervention could be one-on-one — a trusted teacher meeting with a student who is growing increasingly disengaged.

Meloy pointed to successful programs in Virginia and Los Angeles aimed at detecting and heading off school threats. The Los Angeles program, in particular, is considered a national model. The program involves cooperation and exchange of information among law enforcement officers, educators and mental health professionals, who together determine whether students are “on a path to violence” or venting out of unhappiness or psychological troubles with no real intention of harming anyone.

Maria Martinez, a mental-health clinical supervisor at the L.A. County Department of Mental Health and the steward of the county’s program that handles school threats, said that in the 2017-18 school year, the program looked into 305 cases. Referrals come from schools, police, parents and other sources, and the team assigned to investigate the threat constructs a profile of a subject, including criminal record, academic background and access to weapons.

“That way you have a complete picture of the person,” Martinez said.

From there, the team decides what sort of intervention and, often, mental health treatment the person might need and keeps tabs on what happens next, keeping in touch with a therapist or with family members, conducting home visits and tracking the person’s contact with the mental health care system.

Santa Clara County has a less extensive system, where mental-health clinicians, sometimes in tandem with law enforcement, are on call to respond to crises before they escalate into violence. The county Department of Behavioral Health Services has a presence in 13 South Bay school districts, holds meetings regularly with county chiefs and provides training to teachers and police officers. The agency also runs a crisis-texting hotline that young people can contact if they are stressed.

More help for cities and counties might be coming at the national level. A bipartisan bill pending in the Senate and House, called the Threat Assessment Prevention and Safety Act, would appoint a task force to create national standards for identifying “patterns of dangerous behavior” and provide grants for local agencies to set up assessment teams similar to those in place in Los Angeles.

Santa Clara County prosecutor McKeown said that, in California, the emphasis on proactive measures also is a function of having limited legal recourse to deal with threats that have not been acted on. She noted that while calling in a bomb threat to a school is a criminal act, threatening to shoot up a school, by itself, is not.

She has promoted the use of the so-called gun-violence restraining orders, also known as “red flag” laws, that allow the seizing of firearms from people who have exhibited threatening behavior. The tactic has elicited criticism from gun-rights groups who say such laws are unconstitutional; McKeown responds by noting the orders expire in 21 days and require a judicial hearing to be extended.

In any case, Morgan said, the goal has to be getting to troubled people as early as possible and hammering home the gravity of how disruptive even baseless threats can be.

“We want catch to these red flags,” he said. “We also want to send the message, ‘You can’t do this anymore. It’s not a joke anymore.’ ”

SANTA CLARA COUNTY RESOURCES FOR YOUTH IN CRISIS

• Crisis text line: Text “RENEW” to 741741
• Crisis and suicide hotline: 855-278-4204
• Uplift Family Services’ Mobile Crisis Team: 877-412-7474