A 14-year-old freshman at Murrow High School in Brooklyn was sitting in history class one April morning when she got a string of chilling texts from a friend. A threat to shoot up the school had been posted on the chat site Omegle — and it included a list of about a dozen students who would be killed. One of them was the 14-year-old girl.

“To see your child’s name on a literal hit list was truly the most completely devastating thing,” said Jessica Heyman, the girl’s mother.

But the girl, whose name is being withheld, knew immediately that the threat was a hoax: Just days earlier, another threat had targeted students at another New York City high school, the Clinton School, using precisely the same language.

The incidents at Murrow and Clinton were two in a string of nearly identical hoax threats aimed at more than a dozen New York City schools over the last four months, and at least nine other schools nationwide, including ones in Long Beach, California, and Hicksville, New York, on Long Island, according to parents.

The New York schools include many of the city’s most elite public and private schools.

New York Times News Service