COBB COUNTY, Ga. — Students and parents were on edge Friday after a social media post started to circulate threatening a school shooting.
The message was a generic threat to “make history as the top school slaughter” on May 5, without a specific school, city or state mentioned in the post.
Still, it had some parents keeping kids out of school and districts beefing up security.
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Douglas County Schools told Channel 2 Action News that Lithia Springs High School delayed its start to investigate a threat. Cobb County Schools said Hillgrove High School both had a larger than usual police presence while classes continue as normal.
Coweta County schools said a student reposted the same threat onto a personal social media account.
The school district added that it is aware of the nationwide pattern emerging.
“These false rumors are impacting school operations in a number of our schools, as well as districts across the metropolitan area, and across the country. As always, we take every report of a threat, or rumor of a threat, seriously to help ensure our schools are secure and our students are safe.”
Channel 2′s Tyisha Fernandes was at Tri-Cities High School in East Point on Friday. She spoke to investigators, who said the threat was not credible.
The same threat was also circulating in Florida, Tennessee and North Carolina, even as far away as Nevada.
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Cindy Puk was picking up her sister from school Friday, She said if she’d known about the threat, she wouldn’t have even sent her sister to school.
“Because there’s always a ‘What if?’” Puk said. “For me, living in the times that we’re living in right now, I would take it seriously.”
Fernandes learned that schools get way more threats than parents know about because the districts only notify parents of threats they believe they are credible.
This is not the first time that multiple school districts were the target of coordinated, false reports of an active shooter on campus.
The same happened in November caused panic at several Georgia high schools. Officials determined it to be a hoax and said the FBI was investigating the false reports as an act of domestic terrorism.
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