A 14-year-old freshman from Mallow High School in Brooklyn was sitting in a history class one morning in April when he received a series of chilling textbooks from a friend. A threat to shoot him at school was posted on the chat site Omegle — and it contained a list of about 12 students who would be killed. One of them was a 14-year-old girl.
“Displaying your child’s name on a literal hit list was really the most completely devastating thing,” said the girl’s mother, Jessica Hayman.
However, the girl whose name was hidden soon realized that the threat was a hoax. Just a few days ago, another threat targeted students at another New York City high school, Clinton School, using the exact same language.
The Mallow and Clinton incidents have targeted nearly the same series of fraud threats over the past four months, targeting more than 12 schools in New York City and at least nine schools across the country, including schools in Long Beach, California. There were two. Hicksville, Long Island, New York, according to parents, students, and two senior law enforcement officers.
Schools in New York include many of the city’s most elite public and private schools, including Brooklyn Friends School, Brooklyn Technical High School, Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn, Beacon High School, Laguardia High School, and the United Nations International School in Manhattan. I am. .. This week, police said threats had been made against New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn.
John Miller, deputy director of police intelligence, said the police are investigating seven of these threats in New York City and coordinated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is investigating threats nationwide. Said that.
“These are not credible threats,” Miller said. “They are intended to cause confusion.”
Authorities believe that the threat is probably carried out abroad by someone who finds the name of a school student by searching Instagram for a child with a public account using rudimentary social media skills. Often, they pretend to be students at the school they are threatening, Miller added.
According to another law enforcement officer, the threatening person is targeting a prominent school to attract attention, but another senior law enforcement officer spoke anonymously because he did not have the authority to discuss the threat.
Jenna Lyle, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Education, said:
For decades, American schools had to fight fake fire alarms, bomb threats, and school shooting threats. But these mischiefs reflect the embarrassing new reality of a country that is already recovering from a massive violence epidemic. Social media has made it easier for law enforcement agencies to create an eerie specific threat of violence that clogs one of the few means to crack down on them.
“If the system is overwhelmed by false alarms, some can slip through,” said Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare who studies school violence at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It robs a big tool.”
Omegle, the site of the hoax threat, was also used by shooters who killed 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The hoax threat posted on Omegle about New York City schools mentioned the types of attacking rifles. Used in music that is shot and played: ABBA.
The epidemic of the Dema School shooting threat, and the rise following the particularly infamous or deadly mass fire, is not uncommon. During most of the school year, law enforcement officials said the city threatened school shootings on average about twice a day. The week after the shooting of Yuvarde, the number surged to about 6 people per day.
“Only a few of these threats are serious. Others are threatened with mischievous or destructive efforts, unlike previous generations who pulled fire alarms or made prank calls. Will give, “said Dewey G. Cornell, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Youth and violence. “Social media and the tremendous anxiety caused by the threat of shooting at school are now at greater risk.”
Despite the threat of hoaxes, schools in big cities rarely have targeted school shooting. According to a federal report in 2020, mass shootings were more common in urban schools overall, but these shootings usually stemmed from conflict and occurred outside the school building.
Lyle, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Education, said school officials at all schools were trained in emergency response protocols: “Following the threat, schools usually include scanning and deploying additional NYPD school safety agents. We will introduce additional safety measures. “
After a hoax directed at Berkeley Carroll, a private school on Park Slope in Brooklyn, spread in early February, the school strengthened security and allowed students to travel to remote areas for several days. However, it did not close or close the school and told parents that it was following police recommendations.
One annoying feature of the threat is to name the students who are likely to make the attack. A few weeks before the threat of Mallow High School, Chelsea Altman woke up at his home in Brooklyn on a phone call from a detective in Long Beach, California.
Her 14-year-old son was nominated as the one who shot and killed the school there, the detective told her. She woke up her son. It turned out that he already knew he had been mistakenly identified as a potential threat, but that was not the case at the school. He learned the day before that he was nominated as a potential attacker for a threat to Manhattan’s Clinton School.
“It took me a few minutes to unpack what really happened and realize that some people are doing this to scare everyone,” Altman said.
Long Beach police said the threat posed to Wilson High School on March 30 was similar to the threat posed to high schools in New York, and the detective “determined that there was no credible threat.”
A month after the threat of Clinton School, a friend of Ms. Altman’s son was appointed as an attacker in a mass shooting against the musical and performing arts of Lagardia High School. The list of possible victims included many of his friends. “They added all my common friends from Instagram and added them as names,” said the 15-year-old boy.
The next day, he received hundreds of nasty messages, including the threat, from people who saw the LaGuardia threat and thought it was genuine.
Justin Brannan, a city council member representing the district, including New Utrecht, said: He likened the similarly expressed threat to his childhood game “Mad Libs”.
Omegle, who can video chat with strangers, says it has millions of users every day. After the Yuvalde massacre, a 17-year-old girl stepped forward and claimed to have had a nosebleed, saying she had an uneasy exchange with a gunner who showed a blood-seen gun on the floor at Omegle.
The threats posed at Omegle to schools in New York and elsewhere follow the pattern, law enforcement officials say: The person blocks the video feed, enters the threat, and then ends the chat. After the people who see the threat screenshot and share them, the threat comes to the attention of the authorities.
Law enforcement officials said New York officials subpoenized and received chat records from Omegle containing the IP addresses of the people who posted the threat, but consistently because of the encryption software used by the threat creator. He said he was stuck.
A spokesman for Omegle said the company “takes the threats of users on the platform very seriously” and “works closely with law enforcement agencies investigating threats of users on Omegle.” ..
For those studying school violence, a series of mass shooting warnings is just another chapter in the long history of false threats. They say the strategy will change, but the confusion and the intent to sprinkle the confusion remain the same.
“We see it in decline and in the flow,” Aster said. “For a really long time, people haven’t called me about fake fire alarms.”
Téa Kvetenadze contributed to the report.