Tensions High at South Texas Schools After New Threat is Texted to Students

BAY CITY, Texas (CBS/KHOU) This time the message was sent straight to the students: break the rules and people will die.

Just days after news of a hand-written note sent to a south Texas school superintendent and threatening students' lives if teachers and administrators didn't follow the writer's "rules," an ominous text message was sent straight to students, according to local news reports Thursday.

The message, sent the evening of Thursday, Jan. 5, read: "Forward this to everyone...1 rule broken, two girls dies at the jr. high and 2 from high school, dnt go! The school will be on lockdown," according to CBS affiliate KHOU.

District officials responded by briefly putting Bay City Junior High on lockdown Thursday and kept all exterior doors locked there and at the high school all day, KHOU reported.

The recent message came on the heels of a hand-written note addressed to Bay City Superintendent Keith Brown that appeared to come from an angry parent, who wanted administrators to tighten their policy on after-school detention, according to the station.

The writer threatened to "kill random students" until the changes were made.

Calling the writer a "terrorist," Brown nonetheless told a room full of anxious parents Thursday afternoon that he didn't cancel classes because he was "convinced that the safest place is at our schools. You can see that we have a heavy law-enforcement presence here," Brown said, according to KHOU.

But some parents seemed to be just as upset by the police presence as the threats, "helicopters going around the school, cops everywhere - we don't know what's going on," parent Stephanie Walker told the station.

It was enough to make Nicole Chambers pull her sixth-grade daughter out of school Thursday, after a tense morning.

"It's scary because you don't think anything like that would happen - especially in a small town," Chambers told KHOU.

The district said they had only 55 percent attendance Thursday and had to cancel a basketball game because there weren't enough eligible players, the station reported.

Brown said investigators were tracing the origin of the text message, but he wouldn't say much about a criminal investigation.