‘Bomb’ at School Turns Out to Be Fake : Sherman Oaks: Officials think the scare may have been a senior-class prank. Classrooms and nearby dwellings are evacuated.

A fake bomb that forced the evacuation of a Sherman Oaks Catholic high school Friday may have been the latest in a series of senior-class pranks that included a group of semi-streakers earlier in the day, police and school officials said.

About 900 students at Notre Dame High School waited outside in midday sunshine for three hours as Los Angeles Police Department Bomb Squad officers disposed of what turned out to be a harmless bomb replica planted in a campus locker, authorities said. No one was injured.

The scare may have been one of a string of pranks by members of the senior class, who finished school last week and graduated last weekend, police said.

“This may or may not be part of it,” Detective John Cameron said. “But it’s a good place to start.”

Cameron said the school received a telephone call on its answering machine sometime during the midmorning. The caller said that a bomb had been placed in a marked locker.

After a dozen neighboring homes were evacuated and streets cordoned off near the intersection of Riverside Drive and Woodman Avenue, bomb squad officers found a “box with wires and a clock” in a locker, Cameron said. “It looked very suspicious. . . . It was made to look like an explosive device.”

The officers promptly “rendered the device safe” with an apparatus that dismantled it, Cameron said, adding that planting a fake bomb constitutes a felony.

Students left their classes about 11:30 a.m. after administrators announced over the public-address system that lunch would begin earlier than usual. As word circulated of a bomb threat, faculty members herded students into the cafeteria and then onto the school’s football field, as far away as possible from the building that housed the lockers.

Several students said their first thought was that the incident was part of senior-class shenanigans, especially after a group of youths ran around the campus in the morning wearing only underwear or, in some cases, scraps of cloth.

“I was thinking more that it was a prank,” said 16-year-old Johnny Betts, a sophomore who was in his geometry class when the announcement of an early lunch came over the loudspeaker. “You had naked guys running around . . . then a bomb threat.”

But students began to be alarmed after they were moved to the playing fields and kept outside well into the afternoon.

“We were a little worried,” Kristine Cu, 16, said. “I wasn’t really sure what to think. It was kept secret--the teachers didn’t tell us what was going on.”

Although police continued to scour the campus, students were dismissed shortly before 2:30 p.m., following the normal schedule, school officials said. Parents were permitted to pick up their children from designated areas, and students with cars were escorted to the parking lot to retrieve their automobiles.