Yesterday, emails were sent to the nation’s two largest school districts, New York City and the Los Angeles Unified School District. New York City Mayor De Blasio and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton immediately determined the email was a hoax, while Los Angeles officials shut down the whole district. From the Washington Post,

New York City officials opted to open their public schools on time Tuesday, calling the message an amateurish hoax imitating a popular television series. But across the country in Los Angeles, Superintendent Ramon Cortines took a different tack, closing every school in his sprawling district in a move that disrupted the daily lives of more than 640,000 students and their families.

Maybe the threat wasn’t real. But maybe it was. And at a time when the world is reeling from terrorist attacks — including two weeks ago in San Bernardino, just an hour’s drive from Los Angeles — Cortines said he had no choice but to be cautious.

Today, the Daily Mail out of the United Kingdom has more of the odd details.

LA police, school boards, and politicians even stuck by their decision after New York officials highlighted major flaws in the email – such as the misspelling of ‘Allah’ with a lowercase ‘a’.
It has also been revealed the writer of the message claimed he joined a ‘jihadi cell’ after he’d been bullied and rejected from ‘one of the district’s high schools’.
The threatening email, which threw school days on the West coast into disarray, read: ‘I am a devout Muslim, and was once against violence, but I have teamed up with a local jihadist cell as it is the only way I’ll be able to accomplish my massacre the correct way.’

Again, from the Daily Mail,

According to ABC, the email which was sent to officials in LA and New York City went on: ‘Something big is going down. Something very big. It will make national headlines. Perhaps, even international ones.
‘Every school in the New York City district is being targeted. We have bombs hidden in lockers already at several schools.’
The mention of the use of nerve gas appeared to be the link made by authorities to Homeland, the popular series on Showtime starring Claire Danes, as it was part of a threat in a recent episode.
The threatening 360-word email sent to the New York City school superintendent warned that schools would be attacked with pressure cooker bombs, nerve agents and machine guns.
It claimed the writer and ‘138 comrades’ would carry out the attack.
Students ‘at every school in the New York City school district will be massacred, mercilessly. And there is nothing you can do to stop it,’ the message said.

and this little error gave the game away:

The person also claimed to be a jihadist but made errors that suggested the writer was really a prankster, including spelling the word ‘Allah’ with a lowercase ‘a.’

The Internet Protocol address was traced to Germany, but that means nothing, apparently, in today’s cyber world. The Onion Router (or TOR) is so named because it wraps IP’s in layers to make finding the original sender extremely difficult, if not impossible.

So, one must ask, was this a Hoax or a Probe? Could it have been a probe to find out how school districts would react? Bad actors from any number of locations and groups might want to know…ISIS, Al Qaeda, Iran (Obama’s buddies), China, Korea, Russia.

Fox News’ Catherine Herridge explains:

Hoax or Probe? Bet we find out pretty soon.