School hoaxes continue, this time with an MIT bomb scare

A residence hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was evacuated in the early hours Wednesday morning following a bomb scare.

MIT Emergency Management tweeted around 2:30 a.m. that Simmons Hall — a residence hall that, per the university’s website, houses 340 undergraduate students, 10 graduate student, two professors and their families, and five resident scholars — had been evacuated while officials searched the premises amid a bomb threat. The dorm has 10 floors and three towers, according to the website.

Close to two hours later, university officials said the building had been reopened following a thorough search. No credible threat had been found.

MIT Police told WBZ NewsRadio that someone claiming to be a student had called officials to say they had placed bombs in the building.

The incident comes as schools across the state and country are on edge amid a concerning trend of hoax 911 calls.

Earlier this week, four Harvard students were “terrified” when they woke up to find university police officers in their room with guns drawn after campus police officers received a false report at a university dormitory, The Boston Globe reported.

Last month, just one day after six people were killed in a school shooting in Nashville, nearly 30 Massachusetts schools were targeted by hoax calls reporting school shootings, otherwise known as “swatting” calls. These incidents followed three straight days of swatting calls at a number of Massachusetts schools in February.

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