A Tennessee teenager is under arrest after promising an attack like Columbine or Sandy Hook at schools in four states, including three in Massachusetts.
"I was actually a little bit surprised to hear he was so far away," said Brockton High School student Meghan Geslin.
The third letter was the most graphic, the most intense, and prompted an evacuation of Brockton High School Monday.
"When we got outside and I asked the teacher at school do we go home or to go back into the school, is there still going to be class? They told us to just go home," said Brockton High School student Clifford Bourdeau.
Local police called in the FBI to assist when dozens of emails and calls came into Brockton High School, Cardinal Spellman High School and Whitman-Hanson High School, plus 13 schools in Tennessee, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
It was all eventually traced to the computer of a 16-year-old Nashville alternative high school student who was charged with a state act of terror.
"Whether they're notes, messages, emails, call-ins, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," said Tony Majors, Metro Schools Security Director in Nashville.
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The teenager romanticized his intentions in his writing, claiming to have been bullied, to be a 2014 graduate of Brockton High School, specifically singling out the principal by name and cutting and pasting his note to say the names of each individual school, all in a sadistic, menacing, if not believable way.
"Somebody had to play a prank that wasn't really funny. So it's kind of sad that you have nothing to do besides sending bomb threats to different schools," Geslin added.
A sample of the hate-filled rant includes the line, "we wish you and your students the best of luck with the next school slaughter. Think of this as the purge... the purge of Brockton. Do what you can to stop us."
"We're trying not to raise the alarm bells and be the boy who cried wolf on every single one of these. Nevertheless, when we see it impact multiple states, we hopefully stop this continuing threat we see," said FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Kieran Ramsey.
"Yeah, it was definitely scary for me because I thought the same thing was going to happen again the second day, but it was fine," Bourdeau added.
The FBI says there have been a spate of threats such as this one around New England and that's another reason they take this so seriously.
