BY DESTINY BRADEN (’17) ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY ANNA MINTON (’17)

The faculty and students went into a lockdown due to a security threat at Denison after early dismissal on Wednesday, Sept. 3.

Sophomore Spencer Kruse-Melfi said she was near the senior lounge at the time, getting ready for a tennis match. Mr. Carpenter came over and told her to rush to the health room. They were told to write their names down and sit at the desks quietly, Kruse-Melfi said.

“I was really scared and nervous,” Kruse-Melfi said. “We didn’t know what was happening, and we didn’t find out for a while.”

218 students were on campus at the time of the lock down, according to an email sent by Principal Matt Durst.

Sophomore Dustin Braden was near the track waiting for cross country practice to start, along with his teammates. They were told to rush inside and were sent to the art room, he said. “The teachers kept saying that it wasn’t a drill, and had us sign our names on a sheet of paper.”

The boys and girls were split up into the different sections of the room, and had to stay in there for almost two hours, Braden said.

“I wasn’t really scared,” he said. “The teachers were very calm and it seemed like a drill.”

At the middle school, there was some confusion when the lock downs at the elementary and intermediate schools were cancelled. The students and teachers were told the lockdown was over after one hour, said English teacher Pam Bice. There was about a five minute period when people thought it was over, and some students left campus.

“I wasn’t really nervous about it,” Bice said. “I hope that we would’ve been informed if the situation was serious enough for us to be worried.”

Anonymous phone calls were made to different schools across the country threatening to “mow some people down” with an AR15, the Newark Advocate reported. Police strongly suspect the people responsible for the threats are currently overseas. A Twitter account was found that claimed the threats were just Denison.