APPLETON, WI (WTAQ) – One day after four schools in our region received threatening phone calls, police are now faced with the task of figuring out who was on the other end of the line.
“Our school resource officer, who’s working on our specific case, is doing a lot of follow up with investigators around the state,” says Sgt. Dave Lund with the Appleton Police Department. “Trying to compare information with them regarding the duration of the call, the specifics that were said, the times that they came in so we’re able to make some comparisons.”
On Monday, the Appleton Area School District said a “short and anonymous automated phone call” about a bomb in the building was made to Janet Berry Elementary School at 11:47 a.m.
Early Monday afternoon, Green Bay police was alerted to a “threatening call” being made to Edison Middle School. Just before noon, a threatening phone call was made to Oakwood Elementary School near Oshkosh. Manitowoc’s Wilson Junior High School also received a similar automated call just before 11:40 a.m., police there said.
School leaders that day made reference to similar calls made to schools across Wisconsin and around the country.
“I think the best way that we can describe these is it’s a lot like the fraudulent IRS scam calls that are out there,” Lund says. “Our difficulty in law enforcement in following these calls is generally related to the fact that these calls get sent through many routers, there’s a lot of technology being involved to mask the callers’ identity and where they’re actually making these calls from.”
With a lot of agencies working on this, Lund hopes sharing the information helps them track down the source of these calls.
DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
School evacuations on Monday due to threats of this nature were reported from New England to California, and even in the United Kingdom. Those reports said that authorities in Colorado and New Hampshire had to evacuate some of the schools getting these calls.
Lund says the nationwide, multi-agency investigations happening in the wake of these threats isn’t necessarily a good thing.
“Definitely a complexity because of the sheer number of calls. A lot of time is taken up by our investigator to follow up with the other state agencies to find out what exactly the messages were, whether it was identical, or a different message,” Lund explains. “Conversely, it may result in the undoing of someone because you have many more eyes on the originating point of those calls than you typically would if it was just one agency.”
Lund says their investigation is being kept locally and that there is no defined “lead investigative agency” at this time.
WTAQ reached out to the Wisconsin Department of Justice about their role in this investigation. In a statement, spokesman Johnny Koremenos said:
“The Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) is assisting local law enforcement agencies in their ongoing investigations into these incidents.”
THREATS ARE ‘SIMILAR’
The call received by staff at Janet Berry Elementary School in Appleton was a “bomb threat,” but that specific reference was not publicly acknowledged by officials in Green Bay and Winnebago County with their phone calls.
“There are some similarities, but not an exact message being reported from each of those agencies,” Lund says. “Similar in nature as far as threats, but not identical.”
Whether the calls stated the same threat or different ones, it was enough to put schools either on lock down or get officials to evacuate the buildings. In each situation, however, none of the threats received Monday by schools were deemed credible.
