This Week in Threats, Heeded, Unheeded

This week at CSU Fullerton (photo from Orange County Jewish Life Magazine)

What to do in the face of threats?

I hope people call me insane’: Social media posts, former teachers reveal alarming mind-set of Thousand Oaks gunman by Matt Hamilton, James Queally and Richard Winton

Cluke, the former high school track coach, said she considered Long to be a “ticking time bomb.” She and another assistant coach, Dominque Colell, recalled how Long attacked Colell during a dispute in 2008. Colell said she was trying to determine if Long owned a cellphone that had been found by another student, and he was shaking with rage.

“He started to grab at me,” she said. “He reached around and with one arm, groped my stomach. He grabbed my butt with the other arm.” Colell said she reported the incident to school officials, who urged her to drop the issue to avoid jeopardizing Long’s dream of joining the military. “He was very determined and very angry,” she said. “He was probably the only student that I was actually scared of when I coached there.”...

Cluke said she witnessed the attack on Colell, and chose to speak out now because she felt sickened by what her former colleague had endured in attempting to hold Long accountable.“To be sexually violated and told by your bosses, ‘Get used to it’ ... it’s so wrong,” she said....

Cluke said she told her father, a staff member at the high school, and did her best to monitor Long herself. She felt that other staff members in positions of authority ignored Long’s behavior. “They chalk it up to being a teenage boy,” she said. “He needed help back then, and nobody even thought to seek any help for him.”

 L.A. Unified apologizes for keeping mum about armed man who tried to lure middle school girls off campus by Howard Blume

School district officials took the unusual step Wednesday night of offering an unqualified apology to an angry audience of parents.

The administrators told more than 200 parents at Reed Middle School that they had erred in failing to notify them and staff that a man had reportedly approached girls at school and then returned days later in a truck containing an arsenal of illegal weapons.

While insisting that the man posed no threat, officials said they had made the wrong call in keeping parents of students at the Studio City campus in the dark for more than two weeks. “We’re sorry,” said regional operations administrator Andres E. Chait. “This is something that was inexcusable.”

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