A Coordinated Swatting Spree Is Targeting US Schools

A Coordinated Swatting Spree Is Targeting US Schools
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
Close Alert
Oct 6, 2022 7:00 AM
A Coordinated Swatting Spree Is Targeting US Schools
Sixteen states collectively suffered more than 90 false reports of school shooters during three weeks in September—and many appear to be connected.
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
Illustration: Elena Lacey; Getty Images
Save Story
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
At 1:15 pm on September 15, a man who identified himself as Tom Gomez called Sangamon County Central Dispatch in Illinois to report that two gunmen had shot a dozen students at Springfield High School. According to call audio obtained by WIRED, the man was specific. The caller, breathing heavily, told dispatchers that he was locked inside a math classroom with other students and that the two men, both dressed in blue pants and green jackets, were killing students in the adjacent classroom: room 219.
Within five minutes, Springfield Police were at the high school's second floor, descending on the room where they were told a mass murder had occurred. The problem is that, according to police records, Springfield High doesn’t have a room 219. In fact, there was no shooting at all.
The dangerous hoax call was one of more than 90 false reports of active shooter incidents at US schools made during the second half of September, WIRED found. From Lincoln High in Dallas, Texas, to Lincoln High in Des Moines, Iowa; McArthur High in Hollywood, Florida, to Hollywood High in Los Angeles, these false reports are part of a disturbing spree of recent swatting incidents that crisscross the United States. While experts who study violence at schools say that false reports of shootings inspire copycats, state and local law enforcement officials say that many of these swatting attacks seem to stem from a single person or group.
Through local news reports, police records, and interviews with state and local officials, WIRED compiled a list of 92 false reports of school shooting incidents in 16 states that took place from September 13 to 30. Many of the false reports we tracked align with data collected by the Educator’s School Safety Network. While several impacted states experienced only one such call, others recorded a staggering number, including at least eight in Ohio, 15 in Virginia, and 17 in Minnesota during that three-week period.
Of the false reports WIRED tracked, at least 32 appear to be linked to a single group or perpetrator. Of the 60 remaining calls, many were made within minutes of one another. Most police departments refused to provide us with records or did not respond to multiple requests to confirm details about the contents of the calls, however, so the number of calls linked to a single swatting campaign may be much higher.
Content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Data Visualization: Datawrapper
Superintendent Drew Evans of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a statewide fusion center tracking these incidents, says that in each of the 17 calls in his state, the caller had a distinct accent and that the calls were made using the same voice over IP technology. “There’s a lot of different technology that could make it appear to be a single person, but all the indications we have are that it’s either one person or a single entity,” Evans says.
In audio of the call to Springfield dispatch, the caller indeed had a discernible accent. In a detailed report of the call for service, the dispatcher noted that the caller was a “FOREIGN SPEAKING MALE” and that the caller was “SPEAKING VERY FAST WITH MIDDLE EASTERN ACCENT.” Audio of two calls from Ohio that WIRED obtained appear to be of the same person as the Springfield call's “Tom Gomez," and the caller describes the fake shooting with nearly identical details about the incident. In total, law enforcement officials from six states—Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, and Virginia—all described receiving similar calls. In each call, officials confirmed that a man with a heavy accent called from an out-of-state number and reported a mass-casualty attack. In some instances the caller reported that the shooting occurred in a specific room number that does not exist and included details about the color of the pants, shirts, and jackets of the alleged shooters.
Content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
The voice in the false-report call about Springfield High in Illinois sounds identical to a caller targeting schools in other states. One from Ohio is embedded below.
Swatting—a prank call in which someone makes a false report to emergency services in order to get a SWAT team dispatched to a target location—has been around for more than a decade. (The US Department of Justice has used the term “swatting” since at least 2007 .) While no one has been seriously injured in the recent surge of swatting attacks at schools, these pranks can be deadly. In 2017, Wichita police shot and killed a 28-year-old man at his front door while responding to a false report. (In what appears to be a coincidence, Wichita’s North High School was targeted in this recent spree.)
Bolton High School in Alexandria, Louisiana, was one of at least 16 Louisiana schools targeted in September. Lieutenant Lane Windham of the Alexandria Police Department says the explanation is obvious. “I don’t think this is some prank. It’s terrorism,” he says. “When someone’s trying to terrorize the teachers, parents, all the students, and the community, what else can you call it?”
School swatting attacks appear to be preying on a familiar American fear that not only are students vulnerable to violence in their classrooms, but that law enforcement is powerless to stop it, sometimes spurring parents to try to do so themselves. This nightmare scenario became all too real during the mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, in late May, where parents rescued their own children as police failed to act. Meanwhile, the threat of school shootings remains all too real. ​​According to research from Everytown USA, a nonprofit that tracks school shootings, the 2021–2022 school year saw nearly quadruple the average number of gunfire incidents since 2013.
Most Popular
Opendoor’s iBuyer Model Is a Canary in the Economic Coal Mine
Chris Stokel-Walker
Amanda Klinger, director of programs and cofounder of the Educator’s School Safety Network , works closely with one of the school districts in Ohio that were targeted by a swatting attack in September. “In speaking to a number of people who experienced it, I can tell you that the anxiety and fear—it was real to them for 15 minutes,” she says. “There’s a period of time in these incidents where people are literally running for their lives, law enforcement is responding with their weapons, and people think it's the real thing.” At that particular school—Licking Valley High in Newark, Ohio— an armed man showed up to try to help after hearing about reports of an active shooting. At a school in San Antonio, Texas, that went on lockdown after false reports of a shooting, a man reportedly injured his arm trying to break a window to try to rescue students.
Educator’s School Safety Network tracks violent incidents that occur at schools. In data Klinger shared with WIRED, her organization found that since August there have been 99 false reports in the US. That’s more than seven times the number of incidents her organization tracked during the same time period in 2019. (Educator’s School Safety Net does not include 2020 and 2021 in its data set because, it found, the data was too “abnormal” due to virtual schooling.)
On September 13, Houston’s Heights High was one of at least six Texas schools targeted on that day. It’s also the earliest swatting call that WIRED found linked to the single person or entity likely responsible for the later attacks. According to local news reports , the caller described the alleged shooting using many of the same details as in other calls that WIRED reviewed. For example, he gave a room number on the second floor of the building and described the color of the clothing worn by the suspects. In a video filmed by a student at Heights High and obtained by reporters at television station KHOU , police with their weapons drawn can be seen pushing their way through a classroom door that had been barricaded shut with a table. When an officer asks the students if they had heard any shots fired, the students nervously respond that they hadn’t. The video ends with officers marching the entire class down the hall with their hands over their heads to be checked for weapons.
“I think we are going to find that, for a generation of kids, there is a real cost to having this specter of a school shooting looming so large in their minds,” Klinger says.
Content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
A false report made to police in Sharonville, Ohio. The voice matches a caller in Ohio and other states.
State and local law enforcement say they are working with the FBI to trace the source of the calls. But right now, they are providing few details. Lieutenant Windam of the Alexandria Police Department in Lousiana says the FBI traced the call to an “African country known for harboring terrorists.” He declined to name the country. In Cloquet, Minnesota, the police department similarly says that the FBI informed them that the call “originated in a similar bomb-threat incident in Africa,” according to the Duluth News Tribune . In Virginia, where more than a dozen schools were targeted, the chief of police of South Hill says that he thinks “an app was used to spoof phone numbers” and that the “FBI tracked it back to Africa.”
When asked about the call’s connection to a country in Africa, the FBI declined to comment. However, in an emailed statement, the agency says, “The FBI takes swatting very seriously because it puts innocent people at risk. While we have no information to indicate a specific and credible threat, we will continue to work with our local, state, and federal law enforcement partners to gather, share, and act upon threat information as it comes to our attention.”
Most Popular