Wave of False Active Shooter Reports Stir Fear on University Campuses Across US

A chilling text message sent students running for cover, as they barricaded themselves in bathrooms and hastily knocked over chairs in a desperate bid to hide from the perceived active shooter on their campuses.

Within hours, and approximately 700 miles apart, similar incidents occurred at Villanova University in Pennsylvania and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Excited students preparing for a new school year were abruptly thrust 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 universities, the reports turned out to be false: There were no gunmen found, no shots fired. They were part of an apparent wave of hoaxes that have disrupted university campuses across the country, stirring fear 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. “At that moment I thought, ‘I’m going to die’,” she told CNN affiliate WPVI after the incident. 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 on Monday; all of them turned out to be unfounded.

The false calls are a consequence of an atmosphere where the threat of mass gun violence is all too 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 law enforcement, summoning officers who believe a mass shooting, hostage situation, or bombing may be taking place – has been documented by the FBI for at least two decades. 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.

Both the incidents on August 21 began with every university’s worst 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.

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, waves of officers arrived at the campuses as analysts and investigators were actively engaged and quickly teamed up with local and federal partners. The investigation is ongoing.