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Leon County Schools Under Heightened Security After Shooting Threats

Ashley Tressel

The Leon County School district has received multiple threats this month. District officials and local law enforcement say they’re taking precaution. 

Shooting threats targeting Leon County schools circulated on social media early Monday. Lincoln, Godby and Rickards high schools are on heightened security until further notice. 

Leon County Sheriff Mike Wood says all threats are taken seriously.

“I struggle to imagine when I would not consider it a threat, under the circumstances because, you know, what we’re gambling with are human lives. And that’s probably advantage to the criminal activity here in that we’re gonna treat them credible pretty much at every angle simply because it’s our children.”

Screenshots of text messages containing the threat to Lincoln High School circulated on Instagram and spread to other social media. Wood says the use of social media makes it difficult to track down the source.

“This is purely technology-driven, quite honestly, and I have folks in our criminal intelligence unit that certainly have the ability to pursue these kinds of information, but this is a little bit like a needle in a haystack.”

Investigation of the threats is ongoing. 

Ashley Tressel is a senior Communication and English student at Florida State University. Before WFSU, she interned at the Executive Office of the Governor and The Borgen Project, a national nonprofit for global poverty. She also wrote freelance for Carbonated.tv, a multimedia news site and served as managing editor for the FSU International Programs magazine, Nomadic Noles, in Valencia, Spain. After graduation, Ashley plans to embark on her journalism career somewhere in Colorado.