District Officials Hear From The Public About Safety Response

Martinez school district officials received positive and negative reviews Thursday night about the way they handled a series of  events in October that included threats to schools and the discovery of an empty gun case.

About 50 people attended the Martinez School Safety Forum at the Martinez Jr. High Auditorium Thursday night. Superintendent Rami Muth hosted a panel that included Martinez Police Captain Eric Ghisletta, assistant superintendent Rick Rubino, and Director of Student Services JC Camack.

A series of threatening letters, emails and faxes was received by Martinez schools and schools in Concord and Pleasant Hill. The first email was a threat to Alhambra High, received on Wednesday, Oct. 12. District officials met with police, and by Thursday night decided to send a series of robocalls to parents of Alhambra students, and a simultaneous press release, advising people that a threat had been made, and that school was going to stay open with additional security.

That Friday, about half of the student body remained home, and the district received some criticism about the lack of specific information regarding the threat. Other parents praised the district for its response.

Those views were echoed at the forum.

“With the Columbine incident and the other incidents around the nation, why were the parents not informed of the threat, and why were parents not given the choice not to attend school that Friday,” asked one woman. “My son's teachers read the email and if I had known what was in there, I would never have sent my child to school. I was really disappointed. I would like to find out why it wasn't disclosed to us.”

“The decision about how much information to disclose was not public knowledge,” Muth responded. “No one was punished for the absence. We felt we did allow people to make a choice. It wasn't a choice I could make for anyone else. We felt that by publicizing it in a more sensational way would only exacerbate the situation. We wanted things to remain as calm as they could be. There was some criticism that we gave too much information.”

The week following the original threat, a teacher found an empty gun case on the Alhambra campus and the school went into lockdown while police and school officials searched backpacks, lockers and classrooms. Again, robocalls and press releases went out to the community about the nature of the lockdown.

“Please tell us as much as you can,” another woman pleaded. “You seemed to learn from the first incident and gave us a lot of information in the (gun case) incident. But we heard about the John Swett incident from the newspaper.”

She referred to additional threats made during the final week of October, when letters were received by John Swett Elementary, New Vista Christian School and St. Catherine’s Catholic school. St. Catherine’s closed down for a day and a half in response to the threats.

“One of the lessons we learned was that in this day and age, there isn't any way to contain information,” Rubino said. “We had a very limited number of folks aware of the John Swett letter, but if one person knows, everybody knows.” He said robocalls and emails were sent to parents and the media at the same time about that incident.

A suspect was arrested in the case of the threatening missives. Larry Bantola of Antioch is facing 14 felony counts of criminal threats and impersonating another. He allegedly sent the letters in an attempt to ruin a former friend’s reputation.

Ghisletta told the audience that he found it ironic the suspect was arrested on Homecoming Day.

“I wanted to put him in a police car and enter that car in the float and parade him down Main Street,” Ghisletta said.

He told Martinez Patch that the Martinez officers “did a wonderful job. I’m very proud of the work they did. Every lead they got, they followed it until the end. And that diligence paid off.”

Bantola is due to be arraigned on Nov. 10.