McClymonds High Shooting – – According to law enforcement sources, reports that Wednesday’s mass shootings in the Bay Area damaged a number of schools were false. On Wednesday morning, police sped to at least five Bay Area schools to look into phone reports of the shooting. None of the campuses had any missing items. At McClymonds High in Oakland, Lincoln High in San Jose, Fremont High in Fremont, and Woodside and South San Francisco High Schools in San Mateo County, hoaxes were reported, among other high schools.
The hoaxes are also known as “swatting,” which is the act of convincing authorities to send a SWAT squad to stop a purported violent incident when none is actually taking place. About two dozen Oakland police officers arrived at the McClymonds High campus on the 2600 block of Myrtle Street within a minute or two Wednesday morning. They realized within minutes that everything was normal. Police cleared the school before a campus-wide lockdown went into full effect. Police were called there at around 11:20 am after a caller claimed they were in a closet and 10 students were shot in a room nearby.
Police found no shooting or injured people. On Wednesday, Oakland Deputy Police Commissioner James Beere said that “these calls were not organic to Oakland.” He said police will investigate to find the caller. In San Mateo County, sheriff’s deputies responded at approximately 10:02 a.m. at Woodside High on Churchill Avenue for reports of a possible active shooter and searched the campus. Lt. Jacob Trickett of the sheriff’s office said in a statement the deputies had not detected any unusual activity.
The deputies initially locked the school down during the search. The lockdown was lifted after MPs confirmed the hoax. San Jose police received a report around 10:55 am that several students at Lincoln High on the 500 block of Dana Avenue had been shot. Police said they began evicting the school before realizing the call was a hoax. The South San Francisco hoax also brought a lockdown, South San Francisco School District spokesman Peter Feng said in a statement. The school continued after police lifted the lockdown.
The Fremont Unified School District confirmed that police went to Irvington High and also arrived around 11:15 a.m San Jose and Fremont police and the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office said they were investigating the callers. The FBI’s San Francisco office said it was aware of the incidents, but said they were not currently part of the investigation.
