Police Probe String Of

Bomb Threats At Schools

By Andrew Gorosko

Police are probing a string of bomb threats at local schools which have proved groundless, but have resulted in disruptions to classes as building searches were conducted to determine whether any bombs were present.

The most recent incident occurred at Newtown Middle School at 10:48 am on Tuesday, in which a vague bomb threat was found written on an unspecified wall within the school, resulting in the school’s evacuation while police and school staffers searched the premises, said police Sergeant Aaron Bahamonde.

Police received a call from school officials, alerting them that the handwritten threat had been found, after which police went to the school. The search took about 30 minutes during which students waited outside the building, the sergeant said.

Police are reviewing surveillance videotapes from the school in seeking to determine who wrote the threat on the wall, Sgt Bahamonde said.

“In today’s day and age…you have to pursue [a bomb threat] as if it’s the real thing,” Sgt Bahamonde said of the need to search the premises when threats are discovered.

“There definitely is handwriting analysis going on…We’ll keep investigating and doing our best… [The police] want this to stop as much as the school administration wants this to stop,” he said.

About 9:14 am on May 8, police responded to Newtown High School during a light rain, after a handwritten bomb threat was found on a wall in a boys’ restroom there.

The school was evacuated, with its occupants proceeding to the nearby sports stadium, after which they took cover in school buses that were called to the scene due to the rainy conditions.

After the high school was searched and no bomb was found, students and school staffers were allowed to return inside, said Sgt Bahamonde.

Police are reviewing surveillance videotapes in seeking to learn who may have written the threat on the restroom wall, the sergeant said.

There also were bomb threats at Newtown Middle School that proved groundless on May 6, May 2, and April 29. In those cases, the threats came in form of handwriting on the wall in boys’ restrooms.

In a past incident, at about 5:10 am on January 17, a janitor found some graffiti on a student restroom wall in Newtown High School indicating a bomb was present in the building, but no bomb was found.

About 7:50 am on January 17, handwriting was found on a student restroom wall in Newtown Middle School indicating the presence of a bomb, but no bomb was found.

On the morning of January 9, students evacuated Newtown Middle School following a groundless bomb scare there. Similarly, that threat came in the form of handwriting on a restroom wall.

At night on December 19, 2007, a school custodian found a bomb threat written on a restroom wall at Newtown Middle School, triggering an emergency response to what proved to be a groundless situation.

On the afternoon of December 7, 2007, a similar incident occurred at Newtown Middle School.

“The number of bomb threats is a little bit inordinate in our experience here in Newtown,” Police Chief Michael Kehoe said this week.

“We’re working very closely with school officials and trying to determine the person or persons responsible for these actions,” he said.

Whether or not a school is evacuated during a bomb threat depends on the circumstances of the individual case, he said. “It’s going to be [determined] on case-by-case basis,” he said.

“We’ve had bomb threats before, but usually they have been very sporadic,” he said.

 The motive or motives for the recent string of bomb threats is unclear, he said.

“It just takes a lot of investigation,” he said of the need for thorough police work in probing such crimes.

Chief Kehoe pointed to a past police investigation into a bomb threat at Newtown Middle School which resulted in the arrest of a male student there on charges of second-degree breach of peace and first-degree threatening for allegedly making a bomb threat.

That arrest on February 10 stemmed from an October 2, 2007, bomb threat at the school during which no bomb was found by police, the police chief said. The boy who police arrested was referred to Danbury Juvenile Court. Because the accused person is under age 18, his/her identity is shielded from disclosure by state law and the outcome of the case is concealed.

Bomb threats are disruptive situations that should not occur, Chief Kehoe said.

“It’s a problem that we’d like to curtail and stop…Everyone should have a conversation with their child about this,” he said.

Police Officer Domenic Costello, who is the police department’s school resource officer for Newtown High School and for Newtown Middle School, is investigating the string of recent threats.