After a bomb and shooting threat Thursday morning closed Bubb Elementary School for the day, Mountain View police searched the campus and said the threat was not credible.
The campus was closed Thursday after Principal Cyndee Nguyen received an email before school began claiming "that multiple bombs had been placed in the school and that the student planned on shooting students and staff," according to an email she sent to parents at about 7:15 a.m.
Police subsequently searched the campus and found there was no credible threat, department spokesperson Katie Nelson said in an interview. The investigation is ongoing and law enforcement hasn't identified a suspect, but is pursuing leads as to where the threat originated, Nelson said.
The school is expected to reopen and resume normal operations on Friday, Nov. 5. All after-school activities and practices for the day have been canceled, district spokesperson Shelly Hausman said.
Out of an "abundance of caution" police plan to maintain a presence at Mountain View schools Thursday and Friday, Nelson said.
"(We want to) make sure students and staff and their families know that we of course take this seriously and that the safety of everybody is the utmost priority for all of us," Nelson said.
Bubb is the most recent in a series of local schools to receive a violent threat, but Nelson said police have determined that today's threat is not connected to the previous threats and involved a "completely different set of circumstances."
Students and staff were forced to evacuate Los Altos High School on Oct. 1 after the school received a bomb threat. St. Francis High School in Mountain View and Presentation High School in San Jose were then both evacuated due to bomb threats on Oct. 5, which the San Jose Police Department said came from the same phone number. No explosives were found in any of the three incidents.
"The incidents that happened at Los Altos and St. Francis are in no way connected to this particular incident" at Bubb, Nelson said.
In a press release Thursday, the police department said that "we have learned that this kind of threat is part of an ongoing series of threats that have been sent to schools across the world over the last few years."
Nelson clarified that doesn't mean it is connected to other local threats, but said she didn't currently have additional information about the global threats.
Comments
Registered user
St. Francis Acres
on Nov 4, 2021 at 2:55 pm
Registered user
on Nov 4, 2021 at 2:55 pm
Appalled yet? Threats are being made to various schools in the area. Fortunately, none of these have been credible, but this creates another problem: the next one could be real. Not saying the districts and police aren't taking them seriously, which they most certainly are, but get enough of these 'false alarms' and we start getting immune to them. And, if the perpetrators are half-smart about it, they are nearly impossible to catch. These jerks just want to cause trouble and scale the heck out of parents and children (and the community).
Registered user
another community
on Nov 6, 2021 at 12:18 pm
Registered user
on Nov 6, 2021 at 12:18 pm
As a high school student at the former Awalt High School during the 1960s, we had at least one bomb scare every year.
Classes were evacuated and students + faculty were instructed to sequester in the football stands until the MVFD confirmed there was no bomb present.
Then the school secretaries perused the absentee list for the day and the perpetrators were eventually caught.
9/11 and the Columbine shootings changed the protocols and what was once perceived as a practical joke is now considered a potential act of terrorism
Things were different back in the day.