GARDINER, Maine — Gardiner police believe a phoned-in bomb threat that closed Gardiner Area High School on Tuesday morning is connected to more than 30 other similar threats received in Massachusetts, New Jersey and a number of other states in the Northeast and Midwest.
At about 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, Gardiner Area High School received an automated phone message claiming that bombs were in the high school building and would detonate within 30 minutes. The call prompted School Administrative District 11 Superintendent Pat Hopkins to evacuate and then dismiss students, faculty and staff about 10 minutes later — as exams drew to a close — and to cancel all school activities for the remainder of the day, Hopkins said in an email Tuesday afternoon.
Gardiner police assisted with evacuating students, and shortly after noon, two bomb-sniffing Maine State Police dogs searched the building and found no evidence of any bombs, Gardiner Police Chief James Toman said. He declined to release specific details of the threat.
Gardiner police and the Maine Computer Crimes Task Force began an investigation into the threat, and Toman said later in the afternoon that police believed the call to be “a phishing message” originating from California as part of a “widespread hoax.”
By midafternoon, Reuters reported that at least 26 schools in New Jersey, along with schools in Massachusetts, Delaware and Iowa, received bomb threats on Tuesday, affecting thousands of students.
At least one school was threatened as being the target of a mass shooting, according to the Reuters report.
The threats received by the schools were similar, Reuters reported, and Bergen County (New Jersey) Sheriff Michael Saudino said the calls to his school were made in a robotic voice and appeared to come from computer-generated phone numbers that could be traced to Bakersfield, California.
Toman said some of the phrases shared by Saudino are too similar for the incidents to be unrelated.
“It was automated, and it talked about bombs and possibly firearms, and it was a robotic voice we traced back to the California location as well,” Toman said.
Toman said Gardiner police will contact the FBI on Wednesday.
“Hopefully they can get on board and add more resources,” he said. “It alleviates concerns at GAHS that we weren’t an individual target, so that’s reassuring, but there is someone responsible for these 30-odd terroristic threats today that needs to be found and prosecuted.”
Classes at Gardiner Area High School are slated to resume as scheduled on Wednesday.