There isn’t a corner of the United States where students haven’t pondered the possibility of a lunatic with a gun barging into their classroom. So when police surrounded the West Marin School last week, the kids knew what to do.
Students in the sixth-grade Spanish class hid behind a white board and crouched beneath tables. Principal Beth Nolan’s words were fresh in their ears: “We’re on lockdown,” she announced over the P.A. system at around 9 a.m. on Wednesday.
The teacher locked the classroom door, pulled down the shades and turned off the lights.
School officials had learned that morning that a Tomales High freshman and another student had threatened to shoot two eighth graders from West Marin School, according to Adam Schermerhorn, a spokesman for the Marin County Sheriff’s Office.
The suspects had sent the threat in a Snapchat message, and according to a statement issued by the Shoreline Unified School District, students had heard the threat conveyed on the school bus that morning.
When the suspects were later seen at the West Marin School campus, officials decided to take the threat seriously.
Four sheriff’s cars and at least one car each from the California Highway Patrol, California State Parks and the National Park Service descended on the campus to search for the suspects. One boy was detained about an hour later downtown, near the Wells Fargo bank, and the other was found hiding in bushes near the Green Bridge.
Deputies searched a backpack found on one of the boys, and a dog sniffed the area, looking for a gun. No weapons were found. The youths were arrested, booked into juvenile hall and charged with making threats. They were released to the custody of their parents on Thursday.
Sgt. Schermerhorn said the Marin County District Attorney’s Office has not charged the suspects as adults and is considering lesser charges, given their ages.
One of the youths had a romantic interest in a female student that was not reciprocated, Sgt. Schermerhorn said. Her family had called the sheriff’s office several times over the past year to report his threats and incidents of vandalism.
Sarah Culmer of Point Reyes Station, the mother of the other student who was threatened, said she wasn’t contacted by the school until Friday afternoon, two days after the incident. She plans to seek a restraining order against the students and said she was shocked that school officials hadn’t contacted her sooner.
“I feel things were handled very poorly, especially given how many actual shootings we’ve had in our country over the last several years,” she said.
Ms. Nolan and Adam Jennings, the district superintendent, declined to comment on Ms. Culmer’s allegation. “I don’t feel comfortable discussing our interactions or communications with specific parents,” Mr. Jennings said, adding that the sheriff’s office had praised the school’s response.
When Ms. Nolan announced the lockdown over the school’s public address system, sixth grader Holiday Holland and her two best friends hid behind a white board in their classroom.
“We were in the corner, and there were three or four other people behind us. It was pretty cramped,” she said. “We were whispering to each other, and one of my friends was crying.”
Another student lay down on a carpet, rolled over, and wrapped himself inside.
Holiday tapped out a message on her Apple watch and sent it to her dad: “I love you and I’m scared.”
After about an hour, the principal announced that the lockdown had been reduced to a shelter-in-place warning, which meant there was an alert but no immediate threat of violence.
Students had practiced their safety drills just a few weeks before, when Holiday and some classmates hid in an art room closet.
Holiday’s parents, Elliott and Selena Holland, were alarmed but not panicked after receiving her first text. She updated them with several more messages and reported not hearing any gunshots. Violence did not seem imminent.
Mr. Jennings sent a message to parents shortly after deputies arrested the suspects at 10:25 a.m. “Our decision to lock down a school is always based on an effort to respond quickly and decisively in support of student safety,” he wrote. “At any mention of violence, in particular language related to firearms, we will involve law enforcement and take appropriate action based on their direction.”
Mr. Holland had planned to pick up his daughter early that day for a medical appointment, and drove over soon after receiving the message. On his way, he saw six police cars as he drove over the Green Bridge. By the time he got to the school, students had been released for recess, and tensions had cooled down.
Before he knew the threat involved a gun, Mr. Holland wondered whether school officials had overreacted to a run-of-the-mill dispute among teenagers. He quickly changed his mind.
“It’s better to be safe than sorry,” he said.
Selena agreed.
“Just because we live in this great town, don’t believe that we’re safe from something like school shootings,” she said. “It can happen anywhere.”