Two students at Lafayette High School are facing terrorizing charges in connection to school threats that disrupted class this week. Those arrests came after the latest threat Thursday forced the school to go on what Lafayette police report to have been thesecond lockdownat the same school in just three days.
Parents told KATC they are sick and tired of having to worry about their children when they send them off to school.
"It's just one after another, one after another, one after another," said Mariah Clements, a mother who spent the day worrying about her 2-year-old boy at the daycare across the street. "How can you explain this to a two-year-old, what can I — what can I tell him?"
The daycare's owner shared with KATC off-camera that in the 17 years she's been at that location, she's never seen this amount of threats or their resulting lockdowns in such a short span of time.
Just seven months ago, Clements told us she lost her 11-year-old nephew, Van, to gun violence in Morgan City. Still reeling, she emphasized that this needs to stop.
"To whoever put out these threats, you think you're hard or it makes you look like a gangsta, I can tell you this," Clements said. "Ain't no 'gangsta' gonna hurt a child, lockdown schools, cause madness, you are a coward. You can't pick up a fist, you can't take a lick, you are a coward."
Numerous cars and more than a dozen concerned family members lined the streets surrounding Lafayette High for several hours on Thursday, their stomachs in knots as they are forced to keep their distance — only armed with a cellphone to keep in contact with their children.
"I don't like getting the text messages from my kids, 'Hey, we're going on lockdown,'" said Jessica Citizen, mother to two students at the school. "And I'm seeing the threat which, thank God their name isn't on it, but still, bullets don't have names."
And then there's Odyssey Alfred.
Just 18 years old, she was back at her alma mater — this time waiting in a panic to hear from her little sister. She said moments like these bring back memories she doesn't want to re-live or share. She told KATC she had to evacuate LHS for a similar situation during her sophomore year.
"My sister, she's scared and she wants to go home," Alfred said. "When I was going through this, I stayed on the phone with my mama the entire time 'cause I didn't know what to do, I really thought that would be the last words to my mama, so that's scary."
While arrests for these threats were made at Lafayette High Thursday, these parents are still worried for both their children and the future — hoping these threats aren't desensitizing their kids to potential danger in the future.
"It goes beyond the school bell, it goes home with us," Marjorie Munro, a grandmother to two LHS sophomores and an aunt to another student, said. "They've never dealt with this before, they don't know what they're dealing with. The conversation at the dinner table has changed, they have anxiety, they can't sleep at night."
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