TOWN OF WALLKILL – Since the fall, the Enlarged Middletown City
School District has experienced 13 instances of swatting – phone
calls with blocked phone numbers and messages of bomb threats or other
violence against students and staff. Half of those threats have been made
to the Maple Hill Elementary School alone.
US Senator Charles Schumer came to the Town of Wallkill on Tuesday to
meet with town and school district leaders about the problem and he called
on the FBI at the highest levels to investigate who is making those threats.
“Clearly this is somebody who has – he or she may be local,
he may not – obviously they are focused on the Middletown schools
and so somebody has a beef whether it’s a student, a parent, a disaffected
employee or just somebody else,” he said. “The FBI has ways
of tracking these people down as long it gets investigated at a high level,
so I am asking for that high level investigation right now, here.”
Calling the number of swatting incidents in the Middletown area “a
nightmare,” Schumer has introduced federal legislation to put a
lid on swatting phone calls, by among other means, outlawing the blocking
of phone numbers on cell phones.
