A wave of active shooter hoaxes at universities brings panic and turmoil to the start of the school year

By Zoe Sottile, CNN

(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 campuses.

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 Villanova University in Pennsylvania 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 WPVI. She joined the crowd and ran for cover.

At Chattanooga, which was in the midst of Welcome Week 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 the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

“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, a gunman attacked 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, opened fire inside a Manhattan skyscraper in late July and killed four people, including an off-duty police officer.

Swatting – 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 for at least two decades.

And calls targeting schools aren’t unique. One researcher who tracked swatting calls at schools and universities documented 731 calls 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 Educator’s School Safety Network, 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 the first day of new student orientation.

Many swatting calls seem to follow a script, according to Keven Hendricks, a law enforcement veteran who teaches a class about swatting 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, according to a news release 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 a professor of criminology 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 WPVI. “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 canceled its Sunday Mass for the incoming class, 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 who pleaded guilty 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 in a news release. The FBI is investigating both incidents.

Since swatting emerged as a national problem, both federal and local laws have been used to fight it. Several relevant federal criminal statutes 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 made hundreds of fake calls to US officials, and three men involved in the swatting of an unrelated man in Wichita, Kansas, whom police fatally shot when they arrived.

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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