A day after a Huntington Beach High School was locked down and a student was arrested for possessing a fake bomb, two Lake Forest schools were placed on lockdown this morning after several homemade “acid bombs” were discovered to have been detonated overnight.
It's becoming an epidemic at American schools:
* On Thursday, an explosive device was tossed into a hallway at a
Detroit public schools academy, releasing fumes that forced the building to be evacuated. A student facing charges in the incident was being held at a youth home.
* While fleeing from police this morning, a 19-year-old sought in a rape case accidentally dropped an explosive device behind a Norfolk, Virginia, elementary school.
* Bomb threats led to a high school's closure and the arrest of two Bridgewater, New Jersey, students in December. Police later found a stash of explosive materials in the home of one of the suspects.
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And don't
forget the shootings of students in February at schools in Alabama,
Tennessee and a few miles from Columbine High in Colorado.
The improvised devices detonated chemicals inside a container some time Thursday night at La Madera Elementary School in Lake Forest, where school officials found remnants of the
explosions this morning, according to an Orange County Register report.
El Toro High School, which is near La Madera, was locked down along with the elementary school as a precaution. A search of the high school produced no explosive devices. The closures of both campuses was lifted at 10:20 a.m.
The unidentified Huntington Beach High student was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of possessing an imitation bomb and making
criminal threats.
Police had receives a call Wednesday morning that a student brought firecrackers on campus, but a search of the student's backpack in the vice principal's office uncovered what appeared to be a bomb inside, according to a separate Register report.
It turned out to be harmless, and the student told police it was a prop for a movie he was making after school. But a search warrant of his home was issued, and evidence seized there led to his arrest, police say in the piece.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.