Kids arrested, schools closed amid wave of threats after Georgia shooting

The same day a teenager opened fire at a rural Georgia high school and killed two teachers and two classmates, a 15-year-old in a neighboring county was taken into custody after fellow students heard him making threats on the school bus about "finishing the job.”

Two days later, a 13-year-old girl was arrested after threatening to carry out a shooting at her Florida middle school on Instagram, a post she later claimed was a joke.

On Tuesday, a 12-year-old in Texas was charged with making a “terroristic threat causing public fear” after threatening to “shoot up the school” and showing photos of firearms during a Facetime call with another student.

These are among dozens of cases across the country of violent threats against schools in the week since the deadly shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, threats that led authorities to arrest children and schools to close, lock down or increase police presence, according to research shared with USA TODAY by Everytown for Gun Safety.

Among more than three dozen threats logged by the violence prevention group and USA TODAY, some are heartrending — a gun confiscated from a 6-year-old student in Tennessee — and others devastating — a 15-year-old boy grievously injured in a shooting at a high school in Omaha, Nebraska.

How to tell whether threats are real or not is a dilemma that has come into sharp focus since the Georgia shooting.

“The best way to assess the legitimacy of a school shooting threat is to know if there's access to a firearm, because it's just bluster if there is no access,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy of Everytown for Gun Safety.

The revelation that authorities questioned the teen suspect in the Georgia shooting a year earlier but took no action after an online threat to “shoot up a middle school” has sparked a deeper conversation about how thoroughly police investigate these threats and what should happen to the often very young perpetrators.

“We have to avoid both over-reacting and under-reacting to student threats, and behavioral threat assessment is the best way to do that,” said Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist and professor of education at the University of Virginia.

By the numbers:Who are the young children being arrested at schools?

Cornell said high-profile school shootings typically lead to a surge in student arrests, “but unless we use a formal behavioral threat assessment approach, there is a risk that many young people will be arrested for threats that are not serious."

Deadly stakes, life-changing consequences to school threat investigations

David Riedman, a criminal justice researcher and creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, said arresting a child for a threat that is not considered serious is not an effective way to prevent violence in schools and would likely result in them losing access to critical support systems.

“The strongest correlate to somebody being a lifetime habitual criminal offender and having multiple incarcerations is somebody that has justice involvement as a juvenile,” Riedman said. “So pretty much, if you arrest a kid for some type of threat, there's a very good chance that you're turning that kid into a lifetime, habitual offender. So that's not a good outcome at all.”

Whether a school shooting threat ends with an arrest or the case being closed is often left to the discretion of the individual doing the initial investigation. In Georgia, Riedman and other experts said they were disturbed to see deputies from the Jackson County Sheriff's Office had dismissed concerns so quickly after interviewing the teenager and his father in 2023.

The FBI had traced a tip about online threats to commit a school shooting to Colt Gray, then 13, who denied making the threat. His father told officers he did not have unfettered access to guns in the house. In body camera video obtained by USA TODAY, a deputy could be heard saying they had to take the teenager at his word. The FBI later said there was no probable cause for an arrest.

Officers investigating a school shooting threat should look deeper to determine whether students have expressed a reason for wanting to commit a shooting, if they have planned or prepared in any way, for example by researching previous school shootings, Riedman said.

He added that the incident in Georgia shows the need for “a standardized, national system for information reporting,” around school shooting threats similar to the effort to combat terrorism after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, an effort he said could be assisted by artificial intelligence. 

“It's that lots of different people in different agencies and different places all have the pieces of information that you would need to put together,” Riedman said. “But unless you create a standardized system and a standardized playbook that everybody's working towards, all of that piecemeal information is never going to get connected.”

How often do school shooting threats lead to arrest?

There is no national database tracking threats against schools, but Riedman estimated there may be more than 100,000 each year. In a study of about 1,000 shooting threats at K–12 schools over four years, Riedman found the most common known resolution was the arrest of the person who made the threat. 

In the past week alone, police have apprehended children in at least seven states.

• In New Jersey, at least three young people were taken into custody Monday after an online threat against schools in four districts led two to close, canceling classes for almost 6,000 students.
• A student was taken into custody after making a “vague social media threat” against a Missouri middle school Monday on TikTok, Fox 4 Kansas City reported.
• A student in Pennsylvania was taken into custody Monday after a school shooting threat caused the district to cancel all classes, WHTM-TV reported.
• In Florida, arrests were made in two school threat cases. A 13-year-old boy was arrested Sunday, accused of making a social media threats against Madison County schools on Instagram. The Broward County Sheriff’s Office said it arrested a 14-year-old girl Saturday for making written threats to kill or conduct a mass shooting in multiple stories on Instagram Saturday.

Cornell, who in 2001 developed the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines, said that when school officials and law enforcement followed such guidelines in Virginia and Florida, his research showed arrests were incredibly rare. In the 2021-2022 school year, there were more than 22,000 threats made against K-12 schools in 60 of the state’s 67 school districts, according to a report from the University of Virginia Youth Violence Project. Students were only arrested in 0.7% of the cases and were incarcerated in even fewer.

But adopting formal threat assessment policies or protocols is required by law in only 18 states, required by policy in 16 states and “encouraged” in five, according to the National Association of State Boards of Education.

False threat reports complicate enforcement

Schools have become popular targets of false reports and swatting calls. Swatting, which originated in the world of video gamers and streamers, often involves harassment by making a false report to 911. Claiming that a crime is in progress at a target location like a school can prompt police to respond with guns drawn.

During the 2022-2023 school year, nearly 64% of violent incidents and threats to schools tracked by the Educator's School Safety Network "were false reports of an active shooter within the school."

There's no federal law criminalizing swatting despite several attempts by lawmakers, but at least 10 states have some kind of criminal law against swatting — California, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. Some categorize the crime as a misdemeanor, others as a felony.

The increasing number of false reports can complicate efforts to prevent real school shootings. In Chula Vista, California, this week, police launched an investigation after a 12-year-old reported receiving a text message from someone threatening a school shooting, the department said.

Police initially didn’t believe the threat was credible and later determined the threatening message was actually created by the student who first reported the incident. The child was arrested on charges including making criminal threats and filing a false police report.

Contributing: Cybele Mayes-Osterman and John Bacon