Multiple school districts in the Lower Valley responded to online potential threats in late October by enhancing security and even canceling classes in one case. Since then, new threats have largely ceased and law enforcement and safety officials say the risk factor is low.
In most cases, the threats have been anonymous and online, often originating on the social media platform Snapchat. Some threats have singled out individual schools and students, while others were vague and without a real target. In each case, districts worked with local law enforcement in the investigations, and no violence happened.
By the next week, the threats had largely stopped coming in, said Bobby Miranda, a Yakima County Sheriff’s Office deputy who also works as the school resource officer for Wapato School District.
District spokesperson Elena Olmstead said the district is still working with law enforcement in the ongoing investigation.
As of Oct. 25, Grandview High School requires students to present identification badges as a security measure, a policy that Olmstead said was already in the works before the threat.
“That date happened to coincide when all of this stuff was happening, but that was already planned for the 25th,” she said.
No additional local district has reported new threats since Oct. 24.
The Seattle Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is aware of the situation and working with local law enforcement agencies, though officials declined to give details of the investigation.
Assessing validity
None of the threats have resulted in violence, though district and law enforcement officials still stressed the importance of taking them seriously.
While working on the Wapato investigation, Miranda said that the anonymous nature of the threats, coupled with the fact that the message was shared between students made it difficult to trace the origin.
Scott Bailey, a commander in the Sunnyside Police Department, said that in their investigation, officers traced the IP address of the original threat to an unsecured WiFi network in Granger. The Snapchat account was set up about 20 to 30 minutes before uploading the threat.
Zillah police checked on a boy potentially involved in that district’s threat and his parents, said Zillah Police Chief Tim Quantrell.
Zillah School District Superintendent Doug Burge declined to comment on potential disciplinary action in the case.
Quantrell said that since the threat originated outside of city limits, the case belongs to the Yakima County Sheriff’s Office. Sheriff’s office spokesperson Casey Schilperoort said that the office is not a part of the investigation.
Chris Weedin, the project manager for the School Safety Operations and Coordination Center, which works with some schools in Educational Service District 105, including Grandview, Granger, Sunnyside and Zillah school districts. Educational Service District 105 is an agency that supports 25 public school districts and other state-approved schools in South Central Washington.
In his six years as project manager, Weedin said he’s seen similar situations, where multiple districts receive similar threats at around the same time.
It’s common for no violence to happen with these sorts of threats, he said. The majority of violent events do not come with a formal warning.
A desire for real violence is not usually what is behind these sorts of threats, Weedin said.
“They just want the attention. They want the panic,” he said. “They want that sense of control, usually, because for whatever reason, they lack that sense of control in their own lives.”
Weedin said while it cannot be conclusively determined that these threats are never real, the threat of real danger is low.
“In my professional opinion, having researched these and studied them and talked to the people involved, I would say that’s an extremely low likelihood that there is a clear and present danger from these current threats,” he said.
Advice for parents
Weedin said good relationships in the community, whether between schools and law enforcement or parents and schools, are one way to make investigations run smoothly.
“The better our relationships, the more quickly we will get to the bottom of these things,” he said.
Law enforcement officials also encouraged members of the public to speak up if they have information related to these threats or others.
“The biggest thing is if you see something, say something,” said Scott Bailey with the Sunnyside Police Department. “It’s imperative that that that information comes to us so that we can take action on it.”
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November 02, 2021 at 05:00PM
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Recent threats to Lower Valley schools present ‘extremely low’ danger, officials say - Yakima Herald-Republic
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