Sandy Hook Anniversary Sees Elementary School Evacuated After Bomb Threat
Sandy Hook Elementary School, the site of a mass shooting that took the lives of 20 young students and six administrators in 2012, was evacuated after a bomb threat was sent to the school on Friday, the anniversary of the deadly killings.
Newtown, Connecticut, police announced at a press conference that the school received a phoned-in bomb threat around 9 a.m. on Friday morning. The threat was later verified to be not credible, but students were still sent home for the rest of the day, according to reports from CBS Boston.
The threat comes six years to the date that a shooter entered the school building and killed 26 individuals, most of them very young children.
The bomb threat also comes one day after a series of bomb threats were made across the nation. None of those bomb threats were deemed credible either. Newtown police were quick to point out, however, that the bomb threat made to Sandy Hook Elementary School was specific to that building and unrelated to the bomb threats that were made elsewhere on Thursday, according to reporting from Fox 61.
The children in the school on Friday were evacuated immediately, and police reportedly did a sweep of the building after the threat was made.
JUST IN: Bomb threat prompts evacuation at Sandy Hook Elementary School on 6th anniversary of tragedy https://t.co/LMGOLnBPvt
— NECN (@NECN) December 14, 2018
To commemorate the solemn date, flags have been lowered to half-staff on the order of Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy. Church bells rang out at 9:30 a.m., around the time that the shooting took place six years ago.
Malloy expressed his thoughts on Twitter Friday morning before reports of the evacuation came about.
“The unthinkable tragedy that occurred on this day will forever have an impact – not only here in #Connecticut, but throughout the entire nation,” Malloy wrote in his tweet, which was part of a thread of tweets in which the governor also wrote out the names of every victim of the shooting as well.
Many have pushed forward a call for more restrictive gun laws in the wake of the shooting, but nothing at the federal level ever materialized as a result. Some states, including Connecticut, did implement restrictions on guns and accessories that allow gun owners to carry more ammunition within a gun. Since that time, the homicide rate in the state has lowered, according to reporting from Connecticut Public Radio.
Since the Sandy Hook shooting happened in 2012, there have been at least 1,917 more mass shootings across the country, according to reporting from Vox. These shootings resulted in at least 2,175 individuals killed, and 8,035 wounded.
