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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
A wave of active shooter hoaxes at universities brings panic and
turmoil to the start of the school year
By Zoe Sottile, CNN
Updated:
11:14 AM EDT, Tue August 26, 2025
Source: CNN
A terrifying text message sent students running for cover, barricading
themselves in bathrooms and knocking over chairs in the frantic rush to
hide from the active shooter reported on their university campus.
Then, a few hours later and 700 miles away, it happened again.
Reports of active shooters wielding assault rifles on campus sent
excited students preparing for a new school year at and the University
of Tennessee at Chattanooga into lockdown as law enforcement officers
surged to the schools to assess the threats. Students hid behind walls,
locked themselves into dorm rooms and frantically texted loved ones.
At both schools, the reports turned out to be false: There were no
gunmen found, no shots fired. They’re part of an apparent wave of
fake reports that have struck university campuses across the country,
stirring fear and disruption from Pennsylvania to Arizona.
A Villanova senior, Ava Petrosky, was singing at an orientation Mass at
the Catholic university when she saw people in the crowd begin to run.
“Honestly, at that moment I thought, ‘I’m gonna die,’” she
told CNN affiliate . She joined the crowd and ran for cover.
At Chattanooga, which was in the midst of festivities, students
sprinted from a classroom in seconds after receiving a text message
urging them to “Run. Hide. Fight.” Police officers with
assault-style rifles directed them to run across the street, senior
Luke Robbins told.
“It was just hectic,” Robbins said. “It’s crazy.”
At least one more active shooter report was received at Villanova on
Sunday, along with one at the University of South Carolina. Six
universities had active shooter reports Monday; all of them turned out
to be unfounded.
The false calls emerge from an atmosphere where the threat of mass gun
violence is horribly real. Less than a month ago, the US Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, triggering a
lockdown at nearby Emory University. Another gunman, targeting the
NFL’s New York headquarters, in late July and killed four people,
including an off-duty police officer.
– the deliberate practice of making a false report to police,
summoning law enforcement who believe a mass shooting, hostage
situation or bombing may be taking place – has been documented by the
FBI .
And calls targeting schools aren’t unique. One researcher who tracked
swatting calls at schools and universities in the United States during
2023. In the 2022-2023 school year, there were more than 446 false
reports of active shooters at schools, according to a report from the ,
a non-profit dedicated to school safety.
The hoax was a “really tough way to start freshman year at
college,” said Courtenay Harris Bond, who was at Villanova’s campus
with her freshman son Thursday when the active shooter alert went out,
according to WPVI.
A terrifying call
The Villanova and Chattanooga incidents on August 21 started with every
university’s nightmare: a call reporting an active shooter on campus.
In both cases, dispatchers heard what sounded like gunshots in the
background of the calls – lending a disturbing realism to what turned
out to be fake reports.
First, the 911 dispatch in Hamilton County, Tennessee, which
encompasses the Chattanooga campus, received a call around 12:30 p.m.
saying a White male with an AR-15-style rifle had shot four people near
the school library, Chief Sean O’Brien of the University of Tennessee
at Chattanooga Police said Friday.
A few hours later, around 4:33 p.m., a similar call came in at the
Department of Emergency Services in Delaware County, Pennsylvania,
reporting shots fired from a man “armed with an AR-15-style weapon”
on Villanova’s campus, according to a news release from Delaware
County Communications and Public Affairs. Multiple similar calls
followed. The incident fell on of new student orientation.
Many swatting calls seem to follow a script, according to Keven
Hendricks, a law enforcement veteran who at the National White Collar
Crime Center. Hoax callers may also call non-emergency numbers instead
of emergency numbers – since the Voice over Internet Protocol
services used by many swatters typically can’t access local 911
networks, Hendricks said.
‘Every second matters’
But even if there are red flags that indicate a call may be false, law
enforcement doesn’t typically have the time to investigate before
responding because “every second matters” when an act of mass
violence may be occurring, according to Elizabeth Jaffe, an associate
professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School.
“Law enforcement doesn’t have a choice,” Jaffe said. “They have
to investigate. They can’t just sit around and wait.”
During the Chattanooga and Villanova incidents, law enforcement –
with no way to know the calls weren’t real – rushed resources to
the university campuses.
In Tennessee, dispatchers summoned all available officers from the
university’s police department, from the school. In all, more than
100 officers were on scene, Chattanooga Police Department Chief John
Chambers told CNN.
“The response is always gonna be a legitimate response, especially
early on,” Chambers said. “We are what stands between life and
death, and our men and women in law enforcement are going to rush in
and hold that line as quickly as possible.”
Still, the flooding of officers to a fake call can draw resources away
from real problems, according to John DeCarlo, the former police chief
of Branford, Connecticut, and at the University of New Haven.
“It’s taking emergency medical, police and fire personnel away from
a possible real incident that they may not be able to respond to
because they’re responding to a false incident,” he told CNN.
On campus, there was panic and turmoil as students rushed to lock down,
Chambers said. While the call was fake, “it’s real to our
students,” he said. “It’s real to our police officers and it’s
real to our firefighters.”
Officers were “moving in as quickly as possible and literally
sprinting into these buildings to ensure the safety of our kids and our
faculty,” he added.
The chief described the importance of balancing a full-fledged response
to a possible active shooter with the need to keep resources available.
“We know that we have an entire city that we still have to continue
to keep safe no matter what,” he said.
Officers cleared multiple buildings before “finding that there was no
evidence of a shooting or other threat” to the university community,
according to the news release. At 1:51 p.m., a little over an hour
after the first calls, the university sent out an all clear.
At Villanova, “law enforcement agencies were dispatched from nearly
every municipality in the region,” according to Delaware County
Communications and Public Affairs. Eighteen EMS units were also
dispatched.
One first-year law student was inside the law school building when an
officer arrived with his pistol drawn.
He “asked us if we heard any gunshots,” recalled Kyle Mezrow to .
“We said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Back everything up. Get out of the
building.’”
“The adrenaline of it was kind of surreal,” Mezrow said. “You
don’t really know what to feel.”
Law enforcement and EMS at Villanova “operated swiftly and without
regard to personal risk, without foreknowledge that there was not an
active shooter,” Delaware County Communications and Public Affairs
said in a news release. “Valuable resources and effort were expended
in doing so.”
The school , citing “the whirlwind of emotions over these last few
days” after the fake calls.
Old problem, new technology
For DeCarlo, the criminology professor, swatting isn’t anything new.
Hoaxes like a student pulling a fire alarm go back decades.
But the advance of technology, such as Voice over Internet Protocol
services, makes it much more difficult to trace phone calls and has
made these hoaxes more elaborate and harder to catch. He added that AI
has made it easier than ever to fake someone’s voice for a hoax phone
call.
Swatting calls that warn of active shooters are particularly powerful
because they prey on the fears fostered by decades of real acts of mass
violence – particularly at schools and universities, DeCarlo told
CNN.
The fake calls are “traumatic to students,” he said. “It’s
traumatic to families. And it’s overall a growing problem.”
Swatting can stem from a “multitude of reasons,” DeCarlo said,
including a desire for attention and mental health challenges. The
growth of social media and the 24-hour news cycle may enable
“copycat” swatters to take inspiration from previous incidents.
Swatters have targeted everyday people as well as politicians, judges,
celebrities, religious institutions, schools and universities. Some
repeat offenders are responsible for many calls, like a California teen
to making hundreds of swatting calls last year.
Hendricks said swatting can serve as a “gateway crime” to other
infractions. It can be like “dipping the toes in the water to see
what they can get away with.”
Then, if a swatter isn’t caught, “they get more emboldened and they
just see how much more they can do and kind of feel they’re
invincible after they get away with it,” he said.
That includes showing off their crimes online. Some prolific swatters
“are incredibly overt online about their actions, sharing their
swattings live via Discord channels, talking on Telegram channels about
their swatting,” he said.
A hunt for suspects
Authorities in Pennsylvania and Tennessee have pledged to track down
those responsible for the hoax calls.
The Villanova incident was a “cruel hoax” that triggered “panic
and terror,” the university’s president said in a letter after the
lockdown was lifted. The Chattanooga call was “a criminal act,
intended to be disruptive and cause chaos,” the university said . The
FBI is investigating both incidents.
Since swatting emerged as a national problem, both federal and local
laws have been used to fight it. enable the prosecution of swatting
incidents, including laws outlawing injuring or kidnapping threats and
bomb threats.
Some high-profile swatters have faced legal consequences, including two
men from Serbia and Romania who prosecutors say to US officials, and
three men involved in the swatting of an unrelated man in Wichita,
Kansas, when they arrived.
The California teenager in the case involving hundreds of swatting
calls – including to a Florida mosque – was in prison, federal
prosecutors said.
But tracking down the people responsible for swatting calls can be
complicated – especially because someone can make a fake call from
thousands of miles away.
To help address the challenges, the FBI established a “Virtual Online
Command Center” in 2023 that allows state and local authorities to
report swatting incidents.
Chambers, Chattanooga’s police chief, said the investigation process
started as soon as the first call was received. As waves of officers
arrived at the campus, analysts and investigators were also actively
engaged and quickly teamed up with local and federal partners. The
investigation is ongoing, he said.
“It takes a toll on our community as a whole,” Chambers said. “We
would want accountability.”
DeCarlo called for more specific laws to combat swatting as well as
tools to help identify calls made to police or fire departments.
Hendricks, meanwhile, called for Voice over Internet Protocol providers
to implement steps, such as requiring user verification, to prevent
abuse.
He urged law enforcement authorities to treat swatting as a serious
crime and diligently pursue perpetrators.
“Without the full press of law enforcement that’s necessary to hold
these people accountable, it’s not going to stop,” Hendricks said.
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