CITRA — For several tense hours Friday, Marion County deputy sheriffs searched every boy at North Marion High School after an anonymous caller said a student with a handgun wanted to kill his girlfriend and other students at the school.
No gun was found and no one was arrested, authorities said. Sheriff’s investigators said they don’t know who made the 911 call from a pay phone at a Handy Way store at County Road 329 and U.S. Highway 441.
The false alarm put parents, teachers, deputies and students on edge in this rural, horse-farming community. It was only five days ago that a man walked into an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and shot and killed five girls. Last week, a gunman took several girls hostage at a high school in Bailey, Colo., before shooting one of the girls to death.
Marion sheriff’s spokeswoman Sue Livoti said Friday’s event was an unfortunate way to prepare for a far more serious situation.
“We’ll use it as a learning experience,” Livoti said.
She said she didn’t know if the call was a hoax. Investigators will continue trying to find who made the 911 call.
North Marion High School was locked down about 9:20 a.m., almost immediately after authorities received the anonymous call from a man who said he had just dropped off a boy with blond hair and wearing a white shirt and gray sweat pants at the school.
The caller said the boy showed him a handgun and told him he was going to kill his girlfriend and her friends at the school, Livoti said.
Authorities also put nearby North Marion Middle School on lockdown as a precaution. The school has about 1,550 students.
School officials also placed nearby Sparr Elementary School on a “code yellow” status, which means that students only were not allowed to leave their classrooms.
When sheriff’s SWAT team members and deputies arrived, they started patting down every boy and checking every classroom, closet and book bag in the high school, Livoti said.
Kevin Christian, a spokesman for Marion County public schools, avoided calling Friday’s false alarm a way to prepare for a more tragic situation.
“I hesitate to call this a practice,” he said. “It’s an unplanned exercise. . . . I guess this was a necessary evil in today’s day and age.”
However, Christian added that next week, school officials — including principals and teachers — and district administrators will meet to analyze the procedures and how everyone reacted.
“We’ll sit down and look at every step, and see what we can improve,” he said.
Ninth-grader Brandon Herrera, 14, said he was in gym class when his coaches started yelling “Code red!” and “We’re not playing around.”
They ordered all the students into the locker room and told them to sit on the floor.
“We could hear the helicopters outside,” Brandon said. “We weren’t really scared, but we were nervous. We knew that everyone was serious.”
After hearing rumors from other students and the adults that deputies were searching for a gunman inside the school, Brandon pulled out his cell phone and started text-messaging his 38-year-old cousin Pio Pol.
He told Pol to call his mother because she can’t receive text messages.
“My mom then called me and asked if I was OK. I told her yes and told her where we were,” Brandon said.
Marion SWAT team members walked into the locker room and told students to put their hands up against the wall, then patted them down.
“They were huge,” Brandon said. “They were nice, but they were being very serious.”
Meanwhile, Brandon’s friend Jonathan Torres, 14, was in his ninth-grade classroom during the lockdown. SWAT team members walked in, ordered all the boys into the hallway and told them to put their hands up against the wall. They then patted each one down to check for weapons.
Diana Root said she rushed to the high school after her husband, a trucker, called to tell her that he saw several sheriff’s patrol cars surrounding the building. She has two sons at the school, Dustin Landin, 16, a 10th-grader, and Scott McCarty, 14, a ninth-grader.
“As soon as he told me that, I decided to come out here,” Root said while sitting in a pickup. “When we got here, they told us to wait outside the school because they weren’t done searching everyone yet.”
After nearly three hours, officials lifted the lockdown order and told hundreds of parents waiting outside they could pick up their children.
Christian said deputies will be at the high school Monday.
Sheriff’s Capt. Jimmy Pogue said deputies train every month “for these types of situations. So we’re constantly prepared.”
“Fortunately, no one was hurt today,” Pogue said. “If anything, this does test the system.”
