Parents who were frightened surrounded the Texas high school on Tuesday, following an incident in the classroom that was later proven to be untrue.
The standoff at Thomas Jefferson High School San Antonio began at about 1 am on Tuesday after police received an alert about an alleged shooting taking place within the building, as per an official statement from the police.
The school was put under lockdown after police arrived and began to clear the campus, but they did not find evidence of any imminent threat, or of a shooting.
“Our department and San Antonio Police Department established there was no shooting, but then we had to do a methodical search room by room with our strike teams,” stated the Chief Johnny Reyes of the San Antonio Independent School District Police.
“We went to the place where they said the shooting had occurred and we were able to quickly establish that no shooting had happened.” However, a few students were discovered to have been involved in an altercation, however, they denied possessing or carrying weapons at any time, Reyes said.
However, frightened students had already called alarmingly their parents, who poured in a masse to the school in which 29 district school officials and 58 police officers from the city were present.
One man pushed his fist into a window to gain access to the school, cutting his arm. Police put a tourniquet on the arm. Some were detained and handcuffed after a fight with police and police, but there were no reports of arrests.
The incident is the latest in a series of incidents similar to the shooting massacre on May 24 at the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, which killed 19 students along with two educators. The same panic erupted in Heights High School in Houston on the 13th of September following the threat. Threats this week also caused school closures in districts close to Austin and Houston and also in California, Massachusetts, Florida, Arkansas, Oregon, Illinois, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
San Antonio district Superintendent Jaime Aquino stated that the district had to come up with better methods to reach out to parents in real-time. “I’m thinking that if we didn’t have Uvalde then perhaps we wouldn’t have had the reaction of parents. Therefore, we must be aware of this,” he said.
