Trending
BELLAIRE - Bellaire High School was placed on an internal lockdown on Tuesday after receiving a threat.
Superintendent Derrick McAfee said that a threat was written on the bathroom wall. Once the threat was discovered principal Ben Doyle was contacted who immediately followed the school's safety protocol.
"We brought in law enforcement and they did a sweep. Obviously, the threat was not credible," McAfee said. "Now the work begins to identify who is responsible for doing this."
He added that students were not dismissed from the school and after the police completed the sweep the school day went back to normal.
"In a situation like this, you have to be very careful because a lot of people say, ‘Why do you evacuate?’ Well, it comes back to what’s safest for the kids at the moment," McAfee said. "Frankly, if somebody wants to get kids out of a safe environment, that could be a mechanism to do it. So you have to be really careful in how you handle these things."
He added that sometimes the most vulnerable place for the kids to be is outside the confines of the building.
"So we take everything into account when we make decisions as to how to handle these things," McAfee said "But we’re back to absolute normal operation. If you walk through the hallway over there, you would never know anything happened."
Police Chief J.J. Watson said that the Belmont County Sheriff’s Office handled the scene due to the school having a resource officer through the Sheriff's Office.
McAfee added that the investigation is still ongoing.
"We’re still working with the Sheriff’s Office. But what we can confirm is that at no point was anybody under any actual threat," McAfee said. "It was essentially just graffiti. But you can’t treat graffiti as just graffiti."
Sheriff James Zusack added that the Wheeling Police Department’s K9 unit assisted in the sweep.
He said that once the person who made the threat is found they could be facing charges of inducing panic and disrupting public service but will all depends on what the prosecutor Kevin Flanagan wants to charge the individual with.
Zusack said that it is unclear if the person who made the threat was a juvenile or adult.
“We don’t know yet but most likely, percentage wise’ it would be a juvenile,” Zusack said.