LOS ANGELES _ A letter discovered late Monday in a building at Cal State Northridge that threatens a mass shooting this week has prompted police to boost patrols on campus.
A student found the letter, written in red ink on lined notebook paper, folded up on the floor of a classroom. The student called campus police about 11:44 p.m. after he read it, said Cal State Northridge Police Chief Anne Glavin.
The letter is laced with profanity and warns of a shooting on the campus on Wednesday. The letter also threatens that students from Northridge Academy High School will carry out a similar attack on their campus.
"The teachers and proffessors are surely going to ... die for making students depressed and giving us ... work that will never serve us good in life," the letter states.
Campus police are trying to determine who wrote the letter but have not identified any suspects.
The letter comes less than a week after a similar threat was scrawled in black marker on a bathroom wall in Sierra Hall. In that incident, anti-Semitic symbols accompanied racist language and the threat of a mass shooting.
Glavin said officials have not identified the person responsible for the bathroom messages. She declined to comment on any possible connections between the two incidents.
Cal State Northridge President Dianne Harrison wrote in a message to the campus that "the last several days have been incredibly difficult for the CSUN family."
"Sadly, the world in which we live requires we take threats of violence and expressions of hate seriously _ even when there is no evidence to suggest that the threatened acts are likely to materialize," she wrote. "The determination by CSUN Police and their law enforcement partners, at this time, remains that this threat is not credible."
Final exams for CSUN students begin Wednesday and continue through early next week. Some instructors have arranged for students to take exams off campus or online in the wake of the threats, authorities said.
Some students have called for the campus to be shut down in an abundance of caution. Officials, however, have decided not to close the university at this time.
"We're certainly not going to bow down to threats, but at the same time, we need to keep people safe," Glavin said. "Seeing this type of threat, especially after Thousand Oaks, it turns people's nerves upside down."
