No Credible Threat Found, But St. Johns County Schools Get Extra Police After AI "Cat in the Hat" Posts

St. Johns County Sheriff Robert Hardwick and School District Superintendent Dr. Brennan Asplen confirmed this week that a flood of AI-generated "Cat in the Hat" threat images spreading on social media has no credible connection to any school in the county. Even so, deputies were posted at campuses across the district, including schools in St. Augustine, after the posts rattled students and parents returning from Labor Day weekend.

The images show a menacing, AI-altered version of the Dr. Seuss character, sometimes paired with captions threatening violence at specific schools. The trend has spread across multiple states in recent days, and St. Johns County is one of many Florida counties where it surfaced this week.

Hardwick said his office chose to treat every school in the county as a potential target rather than try to guess which posts were serious. "We treated it as every school in St. Johns County to protect them," he said. He added that the threats have not stayed confined to school hours. He and the district's deputy superintendent were at a makeup football game between Tocoi Creek and Beachside high schools Monday night when new threats came in over social media in real time.

"At this time, we have no local suspect with those threats here in St. Johns County," Hardwick said.

Why the posts keep spreading

Much of what parents are seeing is not a new threat but the same handful of images getting reshared over and over, sometimes with added commentary that makes them look local and current. Hardwick asked residents to stop passing them along. "We physically said, don't fall into sharing this post. It's kind of pouring salt on the wound," he said.

Asplen echoed that message and pushed families toward the state's official reporting tool instead of guessing based on what shows up in a group chat or on TikTok. "There's a lot of posts or different social media that goes out that's not even true. They're rumors, they're made up," Asplen said. He said the district investigates every report it receives, even the ones that turn out to be nothing. "Even when it's fake, which is 99.9% of the time, we still follow through with our processes, our protocols, and exhaust resources every single time just to make sure that we are all safe," he said.

Why this isn't being treated as a joke

The review was conducted jointly by the Sheriff's Office and the Florida Department of Education's Office of Safe Schools, and it comes after arrests elsewhere in the state tied to the same trend. A 12-year-old Pasco County middle schooler was arrested September 1 on charges including written threats to kill after posting Cat in the Hat content tied to a specific school. A 12-year-old elementary student in Clay County was arrested September 4 after posting a "death note" targeting students and staff.

Florida law does not treat these posts as pranks. Under state statutes covering written threats and false reports involving weapons of mass destruction (§836.10 and §790.163), making a threat against a school, even one meant as a joke or meme, is a second-degree felony that can lead to arrest regardless of the poster's age.

St. Johns County has a youth resource deputy assigned to each of its 46 public schools, though some schools within the city of St. Augustine are an exception to that staffing. District and Sheriff's Office officials have not said how long the added patrols will remain in place, and both agencies say they will keep monitoring the trend as new posts appear.

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