Police detonate suspicious packages at Brownsville, Henley
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At about 11:45pm today, police robots detonated two suspicious packages found early this morning by custodial staff at Brownsville Elementary and Henley Middle Schools. At a press conference at the Moose Lodge near Crozet, Albemarle police Lt. John Teixeira said there were threats at two different schools.”We have multiple agencies– city, state, federal, local– working on this,” he said. “That should tell you how serious it was.”
Teixeira says a police investigation is currently under way but refused to answer any questions specific to that investigation, except to promise, “We’re going to find out who did this.”
When they arrived for classes, students at Brownsville and Henley were transported to nearby Western Albemarle High School. Brownsville officially closed at 11:30; Henley closed an hour later. County buses transported those students without rides back home. All activities at Western Albemarle– including all sporting events and practices– will go on as scheduled.
Albemarle County Schools Superintendent Pam Moran says that custodial staff reported “suspicious activity that had occurred before school started.” At that point, Moran says, “We immediately went into a mode of addressing how we were going to move students,” before Brownsville was to start class at 7:40am.
Another press conference has been scheduled for 4pm today at the Albemarle County Office Building.
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[...] Janitors discovered an envelope and a “cylinder” at Henley and Brownsville this morning, the middle school and elementary school separated by a parking lot in Crozet, across from the street from WAHS. (Which is confusing. Were they in the parking lot between the two? Was the envelope at one school and the cylinder at another?) They contacted police, who got the bomb squad and the FBI involved. Parents were asked to keep students at home, and those kids who had already showed up were ushered over to WAHS. Late this morning the bomb squad did what comes naturally to them: they blew up said envelope and cylinder. [...]
[...] At a 4pm press conference, Albemarle police Lt. John Teixiera corrected himself and told reporters that police did not, in fact, “blow up” anything at Brownsville Elementary and Henley Middle School this morning, but rather that a package had been “disrupted” using a water cannon and that another “item” had been otherwise “neutralized.” [...]
Maybe they found a few firecrackers again.
Parents better check their safes at home and make sure they aren’t missing any firecrackers!
[...] The two Henley students have been charged with four felony counts of constructing and/or placing a hoax explosive device. On March 27, school officials at Brownsville and Henley discovered several suspicious objects, including a white cylinder with protruding wires, a dark-colored tube taped to a post, and a note with an anarchy symbol and a dripping red stain. [...]