December 3, 2021

BARNEGAT, NJ (OCEAN)–Barnegat Chief of Police Keith A. Germain reported that the police department was actively running down rumors to determine if there’s any validity of a reported gun at the school. At the same time, the department had ten K9 teams working Barnegat High School to systematically search for any weapons.

The Chief later reported that the K9 search and video review was complete, and no weapons were found. The original report was that a student saw another student with a duffel bag that appeared to have the barrel of a gun sticking out of it. We are confident after a thorough review of security video that the report was unsubstantiated.

The Chief said that we’ll be working with the school district to debrief and review the response to this incident so that we can identify areas where we can improve our response in the future. Our thanks for the overwhelming K9 support from the Ocean County Sheriff’s Dept, Stockton University PD, Brick PD, and the NJ State Park Police.

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