Anxious moments after bomb threat

FALLS VILLAGE — State police are still investigating a bomb threat phoned in to the Troop L headquarters in Litchfield early Sunday morning.

The threat resulted in delayed openings in several northwest Connecticut school districts, but not in Region One, which serves six Northwest Corner towns.

At 12:30 a.m. Sunday, Troop L police received a call stating that, "At 7:30 Monday morning I am going to blow up the high school."

The caller gave no further information before terminating the call, State Police Spokesman Lt. J. Paul Vance said. Police said the call came from a cell tower in Harwinton and was made by an unidentified older male.

Vance said Wednesday morning police were continuing to investigate the matter and that he expected new information "soon but not yet." Police were working to determine not only the owner of the cell phone but the identity of the caller.

"We need to place the phone in someone’s hand," Vance explained.

After they were notified by police of the threat, several school districts delayed their Monday opening by 90 minutes, including Litchfield, Torrington, Winsted and regions 6 and 10. The extra time allowed schools to search their buildings as a precaution.

Region One Superintendent Patricia Chamberlain said Troop L never contacted her but she had heard about the threat from another superintendent. Five of the six towns in the Region One School District are served by Troop B in North Canaan (Kent is part of the Troop L coverage area). After consulting with police at Troop B, Chamberlain said she decided against a delayed opening.

"We are very pleased with our decision," Chamberlain said. "We were very confident from the get-go that [the threat] was not in our area."

Instead of announcing a delay, Chamberlain, Assistant Superintendent Tom Gaisford and a team of teachers performed a comprehensive search of the physical plant of Housatonic Valley Regional High School beginning at 6 a.m. Monday. When the buses arrived at about 7:30 a.m., students were held inside the vehicles for about 10 minutes, so they were not in the building at the time of the stated bomb explosion.

Elementary schools were impacted by the decision of the other schools to close their high schools, because schools share buses. A delay for the high school creates a delay for the younger students.

Some parents in Region One questioned the decision to proceed without a delay. One parent, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, heard about the bomb threat while driving to work at 7 a.m. Monday. She felt Chamberlain should have gone on a local radio station to advise the community of the situation. The parent did not have a child at the high school but held her child home from Sharon Center School that day as a safety precaution.

"I tried calling Ms. Chamberlain’s office because frankly, as the mother of a Region One student (though a grammar school student), I felt decidedly uncomfortable with this seeming gap in precautionary measure," the parent said in an e-mail. "There was no answer at the Region One office."

Chamberlain called the parent later that morning and explained that no one answered the phones because the school had been evacuated except for staff members involved in the search.