They became so prominent that city, school and police officials felt compelled to call a press conference late Monday night to address the deluge of calls streaming into Vanderburgh County dispatch.
“We are taking everything we hear serious. We are putting all our resources toward it,” Evansville police chief Billy Bolin said. “We don't want anything happening to any of our kids, and if you're seeing things or hearing things, it's understandable you're scared.”
Ominous social media posts have been sprouting everywhere in the wake of the horrific shooting in Parkland, Florida, last week that left 17 teachers and students dead.
Four Warrick County schools went on lockout Monday morning. Last Friday, Central high-schooler Brandon Lee Jones landed in jail after allegedly posting a threat on Facebook. He told police he just wanted to get school canceled.
Another case came through Tuesday afternoon. A 17-year-old Reitz student was arrested after an alleged threat was found in a school bathroom.
And then another later that night. A girl, only 13, was arrested after allegedly pledging to kill "at least 25 people tomorrow you watch" at North Junior High.
There have also been threats against North Middle School in Henderson, Kentucky, as well as incidents in Mitchell and Orleans, Indiana.
That’s just in this area. By Tuesday, threats spanned the entire country, popping up everywhere from Texas to Virginia to Kansas. In Florida, a kid took to Snapchat to warn students about a shooting while holding what police thought was an AR-15. It turned out to just be an elaborate BB gun.
Then there was Wisconsin, where authorities searched the residence of a juvenile suspect and found two adult men hoarding 15 pounds of marijuana.
They’ve become so prominent that kids don’t even have to write their own threats. A teen in Texas was arrested after tweaking a school-shooting meme created by a student in Jessamine County, Kentucky. It’s become an assembly line of nerves and terror.
All this puts schools and law enforcement in a tight bind. They obviously can’t ignore threats because they could turn out to be real. But if the threats keep coming, officials will be locking down school every few days for the rest of the year – just like Gibson County did Tuesday morning.
So why is this happening?
Laura Ferguson, a social worker with Youth Resources, said there’s no easy answer.
“I don’t want to disparage kids because they are capable of making good choices and being smart,” she said. “And I think that’s the majority.”
But some, she said, may not understand the repercussions of their actions.
Youth Resources defers offenders to Vanderburgh County’s teen court diversion program. They rarely handle kids slapped with the kind of serious charges levied against those making terroristic threats. They deal with low-level stuff like marijuana possession or fighting at school.
But they have wrestled with less-serious intimidation-like cases where kids don’t fathom the weight of their words.
“They don’t understand the serious charges that can be brought against them for something they just see as a stupid thing they did,” she said. “Young people generally aren’t playing the long game like adults.”
That sparks another question: what do we do with them?
Any person who gets caught legitimately planning a shooting deserves the harshest punishment we can muster. But for a lot of these kids, it’s more complicated.
Threatening mass murder is obviously a terrible offense. Police have no choice but to act quickly and harshly to give parents and teachers some semblance of safety because the thought of a child getting shot to death is as sickening as it gets.
However, police have deemed most of the threats around the country “not credible.” The offenders were just spouting off. It’s reckless and stupid, but you have to wonder whether it’s worth burdening a teenager with a low-level felony or high misdemeanor that will dog them for the rest of their lives.
At the same time, you can't let them off easy. Serious intimidation charges could serve as a major deterrent for anyone considering leveling threats of their own -- even though they've done little to stop copycats so far.
There’s a reason a kid does something like this. It means something is wrong. No healthy person threatens mass murder just to get attention. We have to figure out why it keeps happening and get these kids some help. In order to stop a problem, you have to understand it.
That won’t be easy because it’s impossible to comprehend any of this. We somehow have created a society where children get shot to death every few days and politicians respond with a hearty shrug.
Meanwhile, police and social-media scourers are left to prevent the next unspeakable tragedy.
Someday, these threats will slow down. But I wonder if the feelings of dread will ever go away.