Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — The Uintah School District in September took its turn as yet another district in the state forced to deal with a school shooting threat.
This time, however, the threat was not a viral social media trend and it didn't originate from outside of the country, as was the case in some recent incidents in other Utah school districts. Instead, it came from an actual student in the district.
Uintah School District Superintendent Rick Woodford spoke Monday about how it was handled and what the district learned while he addressed a School Security Task Force meeting at the state Capitol.
The threat
"Just after the noon hour, we had a student at Uintah Middle School come to the main office with a really concerning text strand," Woodford said. "In this case, the student ... didn't know the author or who it originated from."
The nature of the text message, Woodford said, was a conversation among students where one eventually threatened to "shoot up the school."
"The student that originated the text message said, 'I'm coming to shoot up the school now,'" Woodford said.
Although the district didn't know what school the student was referencing, they knew the time frame was "pretty immediate."
The response
Woodford happened to be close to the school where the student reported the threat, so he stopped by and the district initiated a districtwide lockdown.
"In many cases out there with school violence, these things have come up and in some cases, they're ignored and then people aren't warned," Woodford said.
After initiating the lockdown, the district contacted the state to try and trace the phone number the texted threat had originated from. As it turns out, that isn't a fast process.
This led to an on-site officer jumping into action and calling the number.
"A kid answered the phone and lied to us about his first name but gave us his last name. So all we had was a last name and I called my secretary immediately ... and there were like, 38 individual students with that last name."
The officer who originally called the number said he believed the student was young. Woodford and the officers narrowed the names down to students at the middle school level, leaving them with 12 names.
Then, Woodford's secretary began rattling off names, with most of them being female students.
"We got to a boy's name and I said, 'Stop right there. Give me the parents' contact information and the parents' name,'" Woodford said.
The first call after this was made to the middle school where that student attended. Woodford and the officers were told by the school's principal that the student had been absent from school the day before on the same day the threat surfaced.
"So then I'm thinking, 'We might get lucky here.' (I) called the mom, asked if there was a student by the name that was given to the officer and she said no. I said, 'Well, what about so-and-so, who's home today, absent?'" Woodford recalled.
The mom responded, telling Woodford her son was in fact home. Woodford then asked the mom for the student's cellphone number, which he said matched the number that sent the shooting threat.
"Once we had the number, officers dispatched immediately, went to the student's home, took the student into custody and then we were able to lift the lockdown," Woodford said. "It was like the greatest drill ever for us because it was a real-world situation."
Lessons learned
Woodford said that the district learned a lot of things during the debriefing from the incident, receiving feedback from all of the district buildings and noting that "we had some things that didn't go exactly right."
One of these things is the speed in which they were able to trace the origin of the threat.
"Had it taken us another, say, 45 minutes to find the origin, we had kids that were about ready to get on the bus and had to go home. Luckily, we didn't get there but the response of being able to find the origin of a phone number, it would be nice if we could figure out a way to expedite that," Woodford said. "We kind of got lucky in this scenario."
St. George Police Sgt. Jarad Carson, who is also a school resource officer in the Washington County School District, said he recently attended a training that dealt with tracing phone numbers in the event of a threat.
Carson said a phone number that can actually be traced back to an actual person is a "rare anomaly" with many threats shielded by virtual private networks, or a VPN.
"Unfortunately, it's not a quick response. If you do it through Snapchat, TikTok or some of these other places, it's probably about an hour to two-hour process to work backward to find out, where does that originate from," Carson said. "A lot of times, again, we'll get the phone number that comes from overseas but working the process, we'll actually track it down to a location in the state."
Carson applauded the training, saying it's something his department has implemented and something that he hopes the School Security Task Force will look at down the road for other law enforcement agencies in the state.
"We're going to get better as we go and we tend to correct because we learn with each experience," said Rep. Ryan Wilcox, R-Ogden, who also serves as the chairman of the task force.
