Los Angeles schools have reopened today after the country’s second-largest school system was shuttered Tuesday following a violent threat. While New York City received a nearly identifical threat, authorities here declared it a hoax, while Los Angeles officials kept the district’s 640,000 students at home. The emailed threats mentioned guns, explosives and nerve gas, and were routed through a server in Germany. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti confirmed Tuesday the threats were not credible.
Mayor Eric Garcetti: “We can now announce the FBI has determined this is not a credible threat—something we couldn’t have announced earlier in the day. And I want to be very careful, because that does not mean that it’s conclusively one thing or another yet. Some have used words that I think are probably inappropriate, like 'hoax' and other things. Whether it’s criminal mischief, whether it’s somebody testing vulnerabilities of multiple cities, we still do not know enough to say definitively. What we do know is that it will be safe for our children to return to school tomorrow.”