I was on my kitchen floor, peering under my refrigerator, trying to find the source of a leak when my phone vibrated. I almost ignored it but I decided to look. It was a text from our daughter, an eighth grader at a Baltimore County middle school.
“Mom.”
“Something is happening.”
“There is like a threat in an email to the school.”
“Now I’m in the auditorium and it’s really dark.”
“There are cops in here to protect us.”
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“Mom.”
It took me a minute to run upstairs and check my email. Sure enough, I had one from her principal:
“I am writing to inform you of a serious incident. This morning, several staff members received an anonymous email that included a threatening message directed at our school.”
I left my husband to finish investigating the refrigerator leak and kept texting with our daughter. I dictated the principal’s email to her over text. She later told me she whispered what it said to her friend, who was huddling with her in the dark auditorium.
Afraid to call her, I kept texting. She kept responding.
“I’m a little scared.” “I don’t understand why the lights are off.” “IS IT A SHOOTING?”
I called the school to find out. The receptionist told me the school was on lockdown but that all students were in their classrooms and learning was not disrupted. I told her our daughter was in the auditorium in the dark, and the only thing she was learning was how to be simultaneously brave and scared in a total absence of information. While we were talking, our daughter texted that the lights came back on.
Apparently, because our daughter goes to an overcrowded school and was in a trailer, her class could not just lock the door and continue their learning. They all had to run to the auditorium. Her friend told me the police helicopters overhead frightened her.
The girls had heard about the school shooting earlier this week in Georgia, where a 14-year-old boy is accused of fatally shooting four people. They had experienced previous lockdowns at school after other email threats. They do the drills. They know most of the time, the threats are unfounded.
But this time felt different.
Our daughter is rarely one to overreact. On Monday, she fainted at the Maryland State Fair; she was still drinking Gatorade in the first-aid tent when she began complaining she hadn’t had a chance to go on a ride and could she possibly stay longer? (Answer: No.) She loves horror movies. She’s an independent sort who spends a chunk of every summer away from us. She’s moving through the different belts in jiujitsu and thinks nothing of throwing down a larger opponent.
But now, she was begging me to come get her. And not just her, but two of her friends. I quickly secured permission from their mothers and got them. Our first stop: Starbucks, for Frappuccinos.
I let them have the run of my office, taking a Zoom call from a corner on the floor because they’d used my desk chair for some kind of elaborate fort. I didn’t even complain when they left their Starbucks cups on my desk, or when I had no idea where my laptop was that they were using to watch movies. I was just so glad they were safe and calm.
As for me, I’m not there yet. Not calm. Why do we have to go through this? Who thinks it’s funny to call in threats to a middle school, disrupting the days of hardworking parents and wasting the time of police officers who surely have real crime to investigate?
Then, this thought: At least it was a hoax, and not a real shooting. At least it’s just an inconvenience and my daughter is home with me, leaving water marks on my desk and absconding with my office chair. Many parents of children in Winder, Georgia; Uvalde, Texas; Parkland, Florida; nearby Harford County and way, way too many other places to name can only dream of having their children home with them.
I’m not a person who thinks nothing can happen where I live. I’m from Pittsburgh, and my father lost two friends in the Tree of Life mass shooting. I go by that synagogue every time I visit my family.
I was friends with Rob Hiaasen, the Annapolis Capital Gazette editor killed in a mass shooting at that newspaper. I taught at University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism in a classroom dedicated to Rob and the four others killed that day. I looked at their photos every time I taught; I told my students to look at them, too.
Yet I, and probably many others here, have been lulled into a sense of false security. We cannot worry about everything, everywhere, or we would not be able to function. So, we send our children to school, to college; we attend concerts; we shop at malls. We hope we, and they, will come home.
Rona Kobell is a regional reporter covering Baltimore County.
