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| A gate to Birmingham Community Charter High School is locked with a sign stating that school is closed, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2015, in Van Nuys, Calif. All schools in the vast Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest, have been ordered closed due to an electronic threat Tuesday. |
LOS ANGELES
(AP) -- The nation's two biggest school systems - New York City
and Los Angeles - received threats Tuesday of a large-scale jihadi
attack with guns and bombs, and LA reacted by shutting down the entire
district, while New York dismissed the warning as an amateurish hoax and
held class as usual.
The shutdown was a rare
example of a major U.S. city closing its entire school district because
of fears of an attack. The decision also reflected lingering unease in
the aftermath of the shooting that killed 14 people at an office holiday
party two weeks ago in nearby San Bernardino.
In
LA, the threat came in the form of an email to a school board member.
Authorities in New York reported receiving the same "generic" email and
decided there was no danger to schoolchildren. Mayor Bill de Blasio
concluded the threat contained "nothing credible."
"It was so outlandish," he said.
New
York Police Commissioner William Bratton agreed, quipping that it
looked like the sender of the threat had watched a lot of the Showtime
terrorism drama "Homeland."
The shutdown
abruptly closed more than 900 public schools and 187 charter schools
attended by 640,000 students across Los Angeles.
LA officials defended the move, with that city's police chief dismissing the criticism as "irresponsible."
"It
is very easy in hindsight to criticize a decision based on results the
decider could never have known,"
Police Chief Charlie Beck said at a
news conference.
Southern California, he
added, "has been through a lot in the recent weeks. Should we risk
putting our children through the same?"
The
threatening 360-word email sent to the New York City school
superintendent warned that schools would be attacked with pressure
cooker bombs, nerve agents and machine guns. It claimed the writer and
"138 comrades" would carry out the attack.
Students
"at every school in the New York City school district will be
massacred, mercilessly. And there is nothing you can do to stop it," the
message said.
A law enforcement official with
access to the document provided the email to The Associated Press. The
official was not authorized to disclose details of an ongoing
investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The
anonymous writer claimed to be a student at a district high school who
had been bullied. The person also claimed to be a jihadist but made
errors that suggested the writer was really a prankster, including
spelling the word "Allah" with a lowercase "a."
The
threat made a pornographic reference to a body part that would be
unlikely to come from a devout Muslim, and it contained no reference to
the Quran.
The threats came in simultaneously
to New York and LA school officials at about 1:20 a.m. EST Tuesday, or
about 10:20 p.m. Monday in Los Angeles.
In LA, the school board member who received the threat immediately contacted school district police, Det. Rudy Perez said.
Across
the country, a New York schools superintendent who received the threat
was asleep and did not notice the email until 5:08 a.m. By 6:30 a.m.,
the message was sent to the NYPD.
An hour later, New York students began arriving at school, and by about 9:30 a.m. investigators ruled the threat a hoax.
The decision to close Los Angeles schools was announced around the same time, at 6:25 a.m. PST.
Los Angeles Superintendent Ramon Cortines said every campus would be searched before schools reopened.
Bratton called the closure in Los Angeles a "significant overreaction."
"We cannot allow ourselves to raise levels of fear," said Bratton, who once ran the LA Police Department.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said he would not second-guess the decisions made in Los Angeles or New York.
The sudden, complete closure disrupted the routines of many Los Angeles families.
Lupita
Vela, who has a daughter in the third grade and a son who is a high
school senior, called the threat "absolutely terrifying" in light of the
San Bernardino attack.
"I know the kids are anxious," she said.
The
LA schools commonly get threats, but Cortines called this one rare and
said the San Bernardino attack influenced his decision to close the
entire district.
The threat "was not to one
school, two schools or three schools," he said at a news conference. "It
was many schools, not specifically identified. ... That's the reason I
took the action that I did."
The person who
sent the threat used an "anonymizer," which uses a proxy server to mask
the origin of Internet traffic, and the email was routed through a
German IP address, according to a law enforcement official briefed on
the investigation. The official, who was not authorized to discuss an
ongoing investigation, spoke on condition of anonymity.
Vela
said she worries about talking to her kids about the threat and
terrorism in general. She's concerned about her daughter feeling secure
in class.
"I don't want this to be in the back
of her head," she said. "Who knows what it does psychologically to
kids?
Is this going to cause her some kind of trauma so that she's not
going to feel safe at school?"
The closure came the same day classes were canceled at San Bernardino Valley College because of a bomb threat.
