The Columbia Police Department has taken over the investigation of the situation that caused the lockdown, said Public Information Officer Latisha Stroer.
RBHS administrators learned of a text message threatening violence, Stroer said. They contacted the school resource officer, Officer Keisha Edwards who asked for assistance at 10:23 a.m. School administrators then made the decision to go on external lockdown.
The lockdown “was completely precautionary. No disturbances happened on campus. Nothing at all,” Stroer said. “Right now we have officers in the area so there is no violence that occurs during school time, and we’ll make a plan of action towards the end of the day.”
Stroer said the police has not questioned or taken anybody into custody yet, and the investigation is still ongoing. It is not clear whether the incident is related to the recent homicide.
“We know that there [are] students that are upset about the homicide that happened over the weekend,” Stroer said, “and right now it’s really an ongoing investigation, so we’re trying to make that connection.”
Principal Mark Maus said Rock Bridge worked with administrators from the Career Center and surrounding schools to make sure they knew the lockdown was precautionary. Students have returned to normal schedules.
“We talked to our district safety coordinator along with CPD and they thought we were OK to return to normal procedure after second block,” Maus said. “We worked with [them] to ensure that our students were safe as well.”
Updated at 11:41 a.m.
The lockdown was lifted at 11:08 a.m.
Of the five police officers who arrived earlier today to investigate the security threat to the school, four have left; one officer will remain to monitor the school for the rest of the day.
Originally posted 10:45 a.m.
At approximately 10:30 a.m. RBHS was put on external lockdown. An email was sent to teachers advising they keep students in the classroom. The lockdown’s cause has yet to be identified though administrators did cite a possible outside safety concern.
By Kirsten Buchanan
Additional reporting by Avantika Khatri and Sami Pathan
Hellen Douglas • Apr 13, 2012 at 1:14 pm
I’m glad that this site is informative. The teachers were not sharing anything. Needless to say Bearning News saved the day.
John • Apr 13, 2012 at 1:06 pm
I’m worried about this, we’ve seen an increase in crime in Columbia and especially in the high schools. We need to becareful and do our best to curb this!
Erik • Apr 19, 2012 at 12:54 pm
Umm…you’ve been watching too much of the news channel. A few months ago, a writer for the Tribune said that crime hasn’t increased that much, but people think it has because that is the only thing that the news channel reports mainly. I stick to the paper and keep away from the Internet news quite often.
Stephanie B. • Apr 13, 2012 at 9:02 am
It’s amazing how quickly you guys got this information up. It was seriously within a matter of minutes, and you had detailed information by the end of the day. I don’t know how you guys do it, but I’m really impressed. Especially since you’re all high school students! When do you have time to do all of this? But anyway, thank you for posting this, because I was really nervous about what might happen after the horrible tragedy that happened last week.
One little tip, though. Perhaps you guys might post the date when your articles were published? Then we would know how new each article is, and we could know what days certain events happened, etc. I personally would find that really helpful.
Excellent work, Rock staff!
Debbie • Apr 20, 2012 at 6:43 am
I second Stephanie’s request that articles be dated. Until then, if you do a Google search on the title of the article, the resulting list will include the date of publication. For example, I was able to find that this article was originally published on April 9, 2012.
Maria • Apr 13, 2012 at 2:00 am
This was scary. Everybody in my class was FLIPPING out!
Debbie • Apr 11, 2012 at 11:07 am
Thank you so much for posting this! You all had this information up faster than KOMU or any other site I was checking for updates. Great job!