Commissioner of Maine Department of Public Safety Michael Sauschuck vowed to find out who is responsible for fake reports of active shootings in ten schools around the state on Tuesday morning.

Sauschuck said calls started coming in around 8:30 a.m. with details about shootings that were already going on within the school. Sauschuck would not disclose the names of the communities. WMTW TV reported that calls were received about the Fort Fairfield, Rockland, Portland, Gardiner, Wiscasset, Ellsworth, Sanford, Brunswick, Winslow, and Houlton school districts.

"The dispatchers went into their protocols  and officers and first responders of all sorts were dispatched to their communities to proper addresses,"   Sauschuck said at an afternoon briefing. "What you witnessed here was a Maine-style response to an event of this nature. It doesn't matter what color the uniform is; it doesn't matter how far you're coming from. We had people off duty, on duty, every single type of law enforcement in our state."

Sauschuck said that the first threat was called into Sanford's dispatch center.

Biddeford schools went into shelter-in-place status as word spread about active shooters before Maine State Police declared them to be fake.

In an emergency notification, Maine State Police said the caller in many cases had a heavy accent, and told the dispatcher that a shooter was already at the school and there were "multiple casualties."

Sauschuck does not expect an immediate arrest in the case.

"This is something that's going to take us a little longer to investigate. We're comfortable with that in the sense that we know there's no active threat in the state of Maine as of right now," Sauschuck said.

He called the the threats "callous and inhumane acts" against kids and their parents.

"We are all in on a criminal investigation to bring someone to justice in reference to today's event," Sauschuck said.

Contact reporter Dan Alexander at Dan.Alexander@townsquaremedia.com or via Twitter @DanAlexanderNH

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