Threats of school shootings that prompted partial lockdowns at Cretin-Derham Hall High School in St. Paul and all Minneapolis public schools today appear to have come from the same source, police said.
Police in both cities are working together and with the FBI and Interpol because the threats have been traced to an Internet Protocol address in Australia, said Sgt. Paul Schnell, St. Paul police spokesman.
"There appears to be some significant similarities between the threats," Schnell said. "There was nothing corroborated in terms of the validity of the threat and there remains significant questions about the credibility of the threat, given that it appears to have started outside of the United States."
Still, school officials and police "have to act on these threats as though they are credible until the investigation leads to a place that we can determine the threat is not viable," Schnell said.
Threats delivered via social networking sites is a relatively new phenomenon, but one that is becoming more popular, said Mike Siitari, director of the Minnesota School Safety Center, an arm of the state public safety department.
Cretin-Derham Hall staff called St. Paul police at 8:10 a.m., immediately after someone e-mailed the school to notify them that a threat had been posted on a social networking Web site, said Sgt. Paul Schnell, St. Paul police spokesman. The threat
was that a shooting would occur "in, near or around the school within 45 minutes," he said.
There was no specific information about who was supposed to be involved in the shooting or a motive, Schnell said.
The person who sent the e-mail warning appeared to have been in the Netherlands, Schnell said. Schnell said the person had seen the threat posted on a "not common social networking site" that was not Facebook or MySpace.
The threat referred to Derham High School, which police believe was referring to Cretin-Derham Hall, Schnell said. Cretin High School, a boys' school, and Derham Hall High School, a girls' school, merged in September 1987.
The school at 550 S. Albert St. secured external entrances of the building and "a large contingent" of police officers responded, Schnell said.
Cretin-Derham Hall officials notified nearby Expo Elementary, part of St. Paul Public Schools, which went into lockdown from about 8:15 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. as a precaution, said principal Darren Yerama. Expo is in the old Derham Hall building.
St. Paul Academy and Summit School also secured its external doors and kept students on campus, a spokeswoman said.
In Minneapolis, an email message was sent to the 311 communication center about 7:30 a.m. today regarding a threat of a shooting at "a Minneapolis school," said Sgt. Jesse Garcia, Minneapolis police spokesman. The message did not identify a specific school and said it would occur two hours after the message was received, Garcia said.
"The threat was to come into one of the schools, shoot it up and shoot themselves," Garcia said.
All Minneapolis public schools went into "code yellow," which means the schools' perimeters are secured and additional security monitor the entrances, said Cathy Foley, Minneapolis Public Schools director of safety and security. The code-yellow designation was in effect throughout the day as classes continued.
"We've taken it very seriously. The schools have taken it very seriously," Garcia said.
Police also tracked the 311 message to threats seen on Facebook and MySpace and "correlated it to those," Garcia said. Those were separate from the Cretin-Derham Hall threat seen on another social networking site, Schnell said.
Just before 10 a.m., parents of Minneapolis students were sent a phone-based message about what was going on, Foley said.
School resource officers at the Minneapolis schools monitored who came and went in school buildings, Garcia said.
The Minneapolis school district has 35,000 students in 60 schools.
As St. Paul and Minneapolis police worked to track the source of the threats, they found they had been sent from the same Internet Protocol address in Australia, Schnell said. But "whether or not the posting was done by someone hacking into an IP address, that I can't speak to," he said.
The lockdowns were in effect throughout the day at both Cretin-Derham Hall and Minneapolis schools, but after-school activities were to go on as scheduled. As of this afternoon, neither had plans to implement a lockdown Thursday, officials said.
Siitari, of the Minnesota School Safety Center, said he is not aware of any case in which a threat posted on a social networking site was followed by an actual attack, but they need to be taken seriously.
Recently, a pep fest was canceled at Simley High School in Inver Grove Heights after rumors of a shooting circulated online, and Facebook rumors about high school fights and a potential school shooting caused alarm in Farmington. In both cases, the threats were unfounded.
He said Minneapolis Public Schools and Cretin-Derham Hall responded as they should have today.
"It's a very impressive job that they did today," he said.
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