Connecticut Day School on Lockdown After Threat
A Jewish day school in West Hartford, Connecticut, underwent a “soft lockdown” after receiving a threatening phone message.
The Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Hartford responded Friday morning upon receiving an automated phone call similar to one received at approximately the same time at a public elementary school in Amherst, Massachusetts, the Hartford Courant reported.
The voice on the automated call said, “This is not a drill. There’s someone on campus with a weapon. To repeat this message hit the star button.” The person who answered the phone at the Conservative nursery through eighth-grade school pressed the star button, the message was repeated and then phone line went dead, police told the Courant.
The school immediately called the police who arrived within 90 seconds and found nothing amiss. Under the lockdown, no one was allowed to enter or leave the school and students remained in their classrooms.
Detectives in West Hartford are working to determine the source of the call and whether it was made intentionally.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO