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.
Middletown School Superintendent Dr. Kenneth Eastwood the laws of privacy rights must be modified as a result of these threats.
“I understand the concept of individual privacy rights, but when another individual, in this case the swatters who are committing a crime during the use of the telephones, then these swatting situations are calling bomb threats, etcetera, into our school, it is unbelievable that the Federal Communications Commission can continue to protect that individual telephone number under the guise of individual privacy rights,” Eastwood said.
Middletown Mayor Joseph DeStefano has another issue.
“The concerns of the parents go beyond the bomb scares, and I understand that,” DeStefano said. “Their kids want a feeling of security any many of you have requested that school resource officers be reinstated back into the schools, at least at the elementary level.”
Officials are hopeful that law enforcement will crack the case soon to put an end to the threatening phone calls.
