The waning days of the 2014–15 school year in Mt. Laurel have been marred with a pair of threatening phone calls.
A bomb threat to Harrington Middle School was called in to Mt. Laurel Police on June 8 at approximately 9 p.m. It was the second threat made on a Mt. Laurel school building in less than a week after a threat was called into Parkway Elementary School on June 2.
Shortly after the bomb threat was called in, New Jersey State Police bomb detection dogs were called into the school for a search. No threats were found, and police sealed off the school until the morning.
On June 9, the bags of every student and staff member were searched as they entered school for the day. Nothing threatening was found, and the school day proceeded as normal.
Marie Reynolds, director of communications for Mt. Laurel Schools, said the search process went as smoothly as possible.
“We checked bags of students and staff this morning and it went really well,” she said.
The school had a larger number of students absent than usual on Tuesday. Despite this, Reynolds said the children who were in school went about the day as normal as possible.
“The kids are fine in the halls,” she said. There’s no sign of stress among the students.”
The threat to Harrington Middle School was not an isolated incident last Monday. Lt. Stephen Riedener of the Mt. Laurel Police Department said numerous threats were made on other schools in the state.
“There were several (last Monday) that were similar to what we had,” Riedener said.
The Harrington threat was also the second in less than a week in Mt. Laurel. On June 2, Parkway Elementary School received a phone call from a man claiming he was in the school building with a gun. The threat came on Primary Election Day, with voters coming in and out of the school’s library. Voting was suspended and the school locked down while police searched the building. No threat was found, and the school and polls reopened later in the morning.
Some have defined false threats across the state as “swatting.” In such a case, the suspect will call in a false threat to get law enforcement to respond to a scene for an investigation.
Riedener didn’t use the term swatting in describing the threats, but said the police department does classify the cases as false public alarms and is taking them very seriously.
Tracking down a suspect who calls in a false threat can be tricky depending on how it came in. Riedener said technology allows people to call from different mediums and mask their identity more than in the past.
“Nowadays they can come over computers, it can come over cell phones, it can come over landlines,” he said. “There’s so many things out there available to the general public to hide their identity.”
Mt. Laurel Police are considering the incidents at Harrington and Parkway to be two separate cases.
“Right now it’s separate,” Riedener said. “There’s no way we can link them.”
Anyone with information on either of the two threats can call the Mt. Laurel Police Department’s confidential tip line at (856) 234–1414 ext. 1599.
