ATLANTA — In Walton County, a 15-year-old Loganville High School student is now in custody, charged with making terroristic threats against the school. And a 29-year-old man is in jail in Fulton County accused of threatening staff at a school in Atlanta.
One week since the school killings in Michigan, school officials and law enforcement across metro Atlanta are on edge and on guard--along with parents, students and educators--battling to put a stop to the threats, the disruptions, and worse.
Since the beginning of the school year, in Metro Atlanta alone, there have been at least a dozen threats of violence against schools, usually from students—students who have been identified quickly, and arrested and charged with felonies.
Zero tolerance.
“This is not a game,” said Burke County Sheriff Alfonzo Williams Tuesday evening, “It’s not funny, you’re going to be charged with a serious felony, you’re going to ruin yourselves.... It’s extremely serious.”
And it’s everywhere.
Burke County is next to Augusta and Richmond County, and Sheriff Williams said his community has raised $4,000 in reward money to help his investigators find out who threatened Burke County High School last week, which forced the school to shut down this past Friday.
In fact, on that Friday, according to Newsweek, more than 500 schools across the country had to shut down because of copycat threats following the school shootings in Michigan.
“We’re never going to be able to control what a person writes or says on social media,” Sheriff Williams said. “It emboldens the coward to continue the threats, if a student can get a school shut down for a half a day or a full day or several days, that’s exactly what they want.”
Sheriff Williams said he and other authorities across the country are fighting a non-stop barrage of baseless school threats that spread instantly on social media. Parents, he said, are often as guilty as their children of spreading unverified information, because, he said, the parents are simply afraid the worst is true and don't think they need to verify information until after they have relayed wrong information. Williams said he must take every threat seriously, and pour all of his resources into investigating each threat, as if it could turn out to be true.
Tuesday afternoon, for example, someone tweeted that there was an active shooter at a metro Atlanta school.
11Alive contacted the school directly at 4:29 p.m.
At 4:33 p.m., the school responded, in all caps, “NO ACTIVE SHOOTER,” going on to say that it was a fight, off campus. The tweet was never retracted.
“And it is creating more hysteria,” Sheriff Williams said--determined, he said, to encourage everyone to fight threats and rumors with facts, and with swift, sure punishment.