An anonymous online threat to shoot up "Wilson High School" set off fears Wednesday in California, Oregon and Michigan, all of which have high schools with Wilson in their names.



In the end, the author was determined to be a 17-year-old senior at Woodrow Wilson High School in Southwest Portland. Portland police who contacted the teen found he did not have any firearms or access to firearms and decided the threat was not credible. Wilson High opened Thursday morning without incident.



The anonymous threat was first spotted Wednesday night on a website, www.4chan.org, described the author's intention "to go to Wilson High School and shoot people at noon on Thursday," said Portland police spokesman Sgt. Pete Simpson.



The website took the threat down, but not before viewers took screen shots of the profanity and slur-filled message. An image of the threat, posted beside a photograph of Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings, includes the following eerie pledge:



"I know how to shoot a gun and nothing will make me feel better than to be the all-time champion of school shootings."



The threat to open fire with a pistol and a machine gun promises to end with a higher body count than the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007, when undergraduate student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 17 others.



The original post did not specify where the school was located. There are at least 249 schools in the United States with the word "Wilson" in their names, 25 of them high schools. The 25 high schools are in 17 states, plus the District of Columbia.



Two minutes after the post went up, when a user asked, "Portland?" the response was, "Yeah what's it to you?"



But word of the threat spread to other states.



A friend of Brian Chatard, Wilson's principal in Portland, emailed him about the threat. He called police Wednesday night. A tipster in Michigan and a student at Woodrow Wilson Classical High School in Long Beach, Calif., also alerted authorities.



"I think the fact that it didn't say where the school was at first raised a lot of antennae at all the Wilson high schools out there," said Chis Eftychiou, a spokesman for the Long Beach Unified School District.



By 2 a.m., Portland police had traced the threat maker's IP address to a house in Southwest Portland. Portland Public Schools officials ran the address through the district's electronic student information system to pinpoint the likely identity of the person who posted the threats.



At 7 a.m. Thursday morning, Portland police -- with the assistance from the schools' Director of Security, Wilson High School staff, Youth Services Division officers, and the FBI -- contacted the residents and detained an unidentified 17-year-old boy without incident. He was released to the custody of his parents.



The teen was suspended and is facing the possibility of expulsion, said Matt Shelby, a Portland Public Schools spokesman.



The case has been referred to the Juvenile Court.



"Thankfully, this was not a credible threat," said Simpson, "but it's a stark reminder that people do this kind of thing."



