The woman who called in a fake active shooter threat at a New Jersey military base wanted to “trauma bond” with coworkers, investigators said.
Malika Brittingham, a civilian Navy employee at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, was arrested Tuesday in connection with the threat.
The Army-Navy-Air Force base around 20 miles southeast of Trenton went into lockdown for about an hour on Tuesday afternoon before an “all-clear” was given.
Brittingham texted someone around 10:15 a.m. and said she heard multiple gunshots and was hiding with other people in a closet, according to federal investigators. The text message recipient called the base’s 911 operations center and repeated Brittingham’s warning, leading to the base-wide lockdown.
Authorities said that when Brittingham was initially interviewed, she claimed to have only sent the text after the lockdown notice went out, ABC News reported. However, investigators determined that was not the case.
Eventually, Brittingham admitted to sending the threat because she’d been “ostracized by her co-workers and hoped that their shared experience in response to an active shooter would allow them to ‘trauma bond,’” the feds wrote in charging documents.
“This kind of senseless fear-mongering and disruption will not be tolerated in my state,” acting New Jersey U.S. Attorney Alina Habba wrote on social media.
With News Wire Services
