False firearm image triggers police response at Rock Ridge High School

A false firearm image at Rock Ridge High School sent Virginia police rushing to the campus and quickly turned a school-day rumor into a public-safety response. Saint Louis County dispatch got the report at about 11:29 a.m. Monday after a caller said a student in the parking lot might have a firearm, and no injuries were reported.

Investigators later concluded the report was tied to a social media image posted by a student and that the image was entirely fabricated. Virginia police said the case remained under investigation and would be sent to the St. Louis County Attorney’s Office for review of possible charges under Minnesota’s threats-of-violence statute, Minn. Stat. 609.713, subd. 2. The central issue for officers was no longer whether a gun was present, but who created or circulated the image and whether anyone could be held responsible for the threat it sparked.

The incident forced the kind of fast, precautionary response that schools and law enforcement use when a firearm report cannot be ruled out. Even a fake image can pull officers away from other calls, unsettle families, and interrupt instruction before anyone can confirm what is real. In Virginia, that disruption landed on a campus already under close scrutiny because of past threats and recent controversy.

Rock Ridge Public Schools was formed by the merger of the former Virginia and Eveleth-Gilbert districts, and the district describes Rock Ridge High School as a wall-to-wall career academy school north of the Twin Cities. The Virginia Police Department says it has 22 sworn officers and four administrative employees serving about 8,500 people in a 19-square-mile area, a small force that can still be mobilized quickly when a gun-related call comes in at the high school.

This was not the first time Rock Ridge had to confront a school-shooting threat. In April 2024, Elijah Kehn of Eveleth was charged after allegedly threatening to bring a gun to school and shoot classmates. Kehn later pleaded guilty to one felony count of threats of violence and was sentenced in October 2024 to 83 days in jail, with credit for time served, plus three years of supervised probation.

The district also dealt with another separate headline in March 2025, when Rock Ridge High School dean of students Christopher John Chad was arrested in a child-exploitation investigation unrelated to the firearm report. For Rock Ridge, the latest false alarm underscored a hard truth: once a gun image spreads, police, school leaders, and prosecutors have to treat it as real until the evidence proves otherwise.