Bay Area News Bomb Threat Fashion Island

PALO ALTO — In an episode that has become increasingly frequent at Bay Expanse schools, a panicked Palo Alto High School went into lockdown for several hours Thursday in response to a phone threat that was later adamant to be not credible, authorities said.

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Police would later determine that the caller used a stolen cell telephone to make two calls to 911 around 12:31 p.m. and said he was going to "shoot up" Palo Alto High School "in xv minutes," according to a Th night news release. The suspect likewise gave the name of a Paly educatee who had no interest in the scheme, in an apparent endeavor to frame the student, police said.

A phalanx of Palo Alto law officers, joined by the Mountain View and Menlo Park police and the Stanford Department of Public Condom, "immediately flooded the schoolhouse" and the surrounding area, authorities said. The school was locked down and students and faculty barricaded themselves inside their buildings and classrooms.

Near xc minutes after, the threat was deemed to be unfounded.

Palo Alto Loftier School junior Renle Chu, 16, hugs her mother Witty Wang after Palo Alto High School's lockdown was lifted in Palo Alto, on Thursday, March 29, 2017. Chu said the school went into lockdown after a phone threat, and that her classmates had started to barricade her classroom unit of measurement the lockdown was lifted, when the threat was deemed a hoax. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)

"Officers take determined that the phoned-in threat was likely a hoax," Palo Alto police said in a tweet just after 2 p.m. "There was no violence and there were no physical injuries."

Officers remained on the campus "out of an abundance of caution" and to offer a sense of safe and security to shaken students and staff, many of whom idea they were in the sights of a possible campus gunman.

Several hours afterwards the scare, police force said they traced the call to a cell phone that had been lost or stolen at the Town & Country Village shopping heart. While the possessor of jail cell telephone had it deactivated, the device was withal able to make emergency calls, which is ironically a common safety characteristic built into about all commercial cell phones.

Investigators also contacted the pupil whose name was given by the unidentified caller, and the student, who was among those in a locked-down classroom, was soon adamant to have had "no involvement in this incident whatsoever," police said.

Detectives are following upwards on several tips and leads provided by students and staff, police said, adding that any suspect tied to the threats will likely face up both criminal charges and ceremonious liability for the cost of the massive constabulary response.

"(The threats) created a great deal of stress and feet for students, parents, school staff and the community in general," police said in a argument. "The police force enforcement response to this incident was meaning, and took officers away from other important duties and calls."

The Thursday threat is the latest in a series of disparate but similar threats in the region since the notorious February. xiv mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, that claimed 17 lives and spurred a national gun-control advancement movement, numerous schoolhouse walkouts and the March for Our Lives demonstrations.

Cupertino High School evacuated its campus Tuesday afterwards a threatening phone call, and last calendar week, law stepped up their presence around San Mateo High School after a human being showed upwards at a Big 5 sporting goods store looking to buy a gun and said he wanted to "shoot upwardly a schoolhouse."

In an unrelated incident also reported  Thursday, San Mateo police responded to an office park in the 1400 cake of Fashion Island Boulevard after a notation containing an apparent flop threat was found in a restroom. Officers and a bomb-sniffing domestic dog from the San Mateo County Sheriff'south Office searched the building and constitute no testify of whatsoever explosive, co-ordinate to a San Mateo law news release.

Anyone with information about the Palo Alto Loftier School threat can call Palo Alto police at 650-329-2413, or exit an bearding tip by email at paloalto@tipnow.org or by sending a text message or voice mail to 650-383-8984. Tips can also exist submitted on the law department's mobile app that can exist downloaded at www.fleck.ly/PAPD-AppStore or world wide web.bit.ly/PAPD-GooglePlay.

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