LOCKHART, Texas (KXAN) – Within minutes of Rosemary Moreno’s 12-year-old texting her about an active shooter, she was out the door and headed to Lockhart Junior High School.

Moreno had already texted her daughter back: “Are you sure …” The reply was yes. She told her mom the school had not put them on lockdown yet, but someone was carrying a real gun.

When Moreno got to the school, she was confused. There were no cops. She describes walking in and asking to speak with her daughter. Moreno had no idea the conversation would end with an officer taking her child to the police station.

At the time, school districts across Texas were taking kids into custody for threats, including some investigators believed were credible and others they discovered were fabricated.

When Moreno saw her daughter, she said she immediately started crying. She told her mom –and later school staff and police officers — that during third period she thought she saw the handle of a gun sticking out of another student’s backpack while she was in the bathroom.

According to police records, she did not report what she saw to any teacher or staff. She went to lunch and messaged her mom.

Shortly after Moreno’s daughter talked to her, school officials and police – the district went on “hold” where staff clears the hallways. Students are required to stay in their classrooms until police give the all-clear.

During that time, police said school officials went over the footage that conflicted with the girl’s story. During the third period, they said Moreno’s daughter did not leave the classroom or go to the bathroom. Officers concluded that she made a false report and arrested her.

Moreno and her daughter were shocked.

“I didn’t know what to think. I cried. I was crying. She was crying,” Moreno said. “She’s 12. She’s never made up anything like this before in her life.”

Moreno’s case underscores the difficulty school districts, and students, face in dealing with threats.

One month, 56 threats

Last September, school districts across the state dealt with a cascade of threats. At least 17 Central Texas school districts fielded at least 56 threats in September alone, according to records obtained by affiliate KXAN through the Texas Public Information Act. That number doesn’t include Austin Independent School District, the region’s largest district, which is still processing KXAN’s request.

The threats run the gamut, from genuine threats to hoaxes and misunderstandings. Districts, both large and small, received them.

Blanco ISD, with a total of just over 1,000 students, received two threats on Friday, Sept. 13. The district provided screenshots of the reposted threats on social media, which showed a person saying they would “shoot up these schools” and would be at school “with a gun on my hip.”

Blanco ISD Superintendent Clay Rosenbaum said the person reposting the threat was quickly found by law enforcement, and they were discovered to not be credible. Those types of menacing remarks and posts are always taken seriously, he added.

“Anytime threats are made, it causes anxiety in a community and a school district, and absences tend to spike up,” Rosenbaum said. “We are fortunate to have a School Resource Officer on each campus daily and numerous other law enforcement officers that visit our campuses on a regular basis. We did increase the presence of officers during the time of those threats to help ease some of the anxiety.”

On Sept. 13, the same day as the Blanco ISD incident, a Lockhart ISD teacher was also alerted to a threatening message on social media that was reported to police and resulted in a student being taken into police custody.

And again, on Sept. 13, Hutto ISD got an “anonymous alert of school shooting” that turned out to be a false alarm, according to a police report.

Del Valle ISD alone received a dozen threats in September, four of them resulting in criminal case reports by police.

Many of the threats were unfounded or hoaxes. At San Marcos ISD, a 911 call taker fielded an elaborate hoax in which the caller whispered into the phone pretending to be inside a school while a shooting was taking place. In the audio of the call KXAN obtained, you hear what sounds like a gunshot.

During a press conference in September about the uptick in school threats, Austin ISD Police Chief Wayne Sneed said the district handled 30 threats the week of Sept. 9, 2024. At the same presser, Travis County District Attorney José Garza said an alarming number of cases involving threats of gun violence in or against schools had been filed in his office.

“If you make a threat against a school, you will be found. You will be arrested, and you will be held accountable,” Garza said at the Sept. 20 appearance.

If you see something, say something

Records show Moreno’s daughter was charged with a Class A misdemeanor for false alarm and report. She was suspended from school for three weeks, and when she came back, she had to go to the district’s alternative school.

But Moreno said her daughter hasn’t changed her story at all.

“I told her, look, if you didn’t see something or maybe a kid told you something, I need you to be honest with me. Just tell me because whatever it was, I will be there for you,” Moreno said. “She told me, ‘I swear to you. I saw a kid, and it looked like a gun.’

Moreno believes her daughter, or at least that she was confused, and earnestly tried to tell her about something she feared.

Moreno told us months after the arrest, the juvenile probation office informed her the district attorney dropped the charges against her daughter. She still hasn’t received the paperwork explaining why.

“The sad thing is, you teach them to speak up; if you see something, you say something. She might not have told someone right then and there at the school, but she told someone she trusted,” Moreno said.

In a statement to KXAN, Caldwell County District Attorney Fred Weber said his office considers several factors in deciding whether to move forward with charges against minors, including if the offense was committed, the age and maturity of the child, the seriousness of the threat and what discipline the school can administer.

‘The Juvenile Justice system is not meant, nor equipped, to be a substitute for parental responsibility. However, where that is lacking, we will not hesitate to take whatever steps we feel are necessary to protect the schools and the community,” Weber said in an emailed statement.

Shortly after Moreno’s daughter’s arrest on Sept. 30, Lockhart ISD published a presentation – The ABCs of School Safety, where school leaders and local law enforcement talked about how to handle the barrage of threats across the state.

Lockhart ISD Superintendent Mark Estrada said, “A child or adult will never get in trouble for reporting something, even if turns out not to be true […] There are situations, unfortunately, to where if we get an alert and it’s found that it wasn’t an accurate report, that things weren’t lining up, that’s where there may be an issue.”

Lockhart ISD, Lockhart Police Department, and the Caldwell County District Attorney’s office all declined to interview with our team.

In a statement to KXAN, officials with the Lockhart Police Department, the agency that made the arrest, said the department takes all reports of guns at school seriously, adding “valuable police resources are utilized” for calls of that nature.

History of school violence

With Texas’ history of school gun violence, school officials must take every threat seriously. On May 18, 2018, a student at Santa Fe High School, which is south of Houston, shot and killed eight high schoolers and two teachers.

Four years later, on May 24, 2022, a former student entered Uvalde ISD’s Robb Elementary School with a semiautomatic rifle and fatally shot 19 children and two teachers, marking the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.

Following Uvalde, Gov. Greg Abbott called on state law enforcement and education leaders to promote the state’s tool for reporting threats and concerning behaviors called iWatch Texas.

Texas Department of Public Safety operates iWatch Texas, a platform for anonymously reporting suspicious activity online or by phone. The platform specifically differentiates school-related threats.

While the number of non-school threats to iWatch trended down through the middle of last year, school-related threats increased, according to data obtained by KXAN.

The numbers predate the raft of school threats districts began fielding in September last year.

Her story never changed

Records show in the new year, Lockhart ISD officials sent out notifications about another four threats at their campuses, including one where the district said a student was taken into police custody.

Months after the arrest of her daughter, Moreno still believes she did not intentionally give a false report. Moreno said even if she had, she is not sure how she would feel about any 12-year-old facing arrest.

Moreno said in the days leading up to the incident her daughter was already scared and on high alert because of news stories about other school threats from across the state.

“Her story never changed. Not once,” Moreno said. “It got to the point where I felt bad as a parent because I asked her so much. Now she is starting to doubt if anybody believed her.”

KXAN Investigative Photojournalist Richie Bowes, Director of Investigations & Innovation Josh Hinkle, Investigative Photojournalist Chris Nelson and Digital Executive Producer Andrew Schnitker contributed to this report.