Report of active shooting in St. John’s escalated when Massachusetts officer fired gun
It started with a hoax active fire call to the local police. An all-boys Catholic preparatory school was closed and police stormed the campus. Some students fled into the surrounding woods. Then things got worse.
As officers in Danvers, Mass., cleared classrooms and buildings on Monday at St. John’s Preparatory, a school for 1,450 boys in grades six through 12, a gunshot rang out, prompting a police response more important. But it was a police officer who accidentally discharged a weapon in a college bathroom, officials said, not an active shooter.
Still, reports of gunfire “took the situation from a normal response to a true active shooter situation,” said the town of Danvers, a suburb about 20 miles from Boston with about 28,000 residents. , on Facebook. No one was injured and no threats were found, officials said.
Danvers Police Chief James Lovell said the shooting sparked an increased law enforcement presence at the school in an already chaotic situation. He said police chiefs from neighboring departments came to offer assistance.
The fake call that an active shooter was on campus came around 1:45 p.m. Monday, school principal Edward Hardiman said at a news conference. The school was closed and students and staff followed procedures that were practiced during drills, he said. The school would be the target of a “swatting” appeal, officials said.
“Our students, faculty and staff did exactly what they were supposed to do,” Hardiman said. “It’s everybody’s nightmare. Every parent, in the context of our culture today, fears that things like this could happen.”
SWATTING CALLS A “CRUEL HOAX”:Schools across the US hit by dozens of fake shootings and bomb threats
“Swatting” calls deliberately attempt to attract a large response from the police or SWAT team with a false report of an active shooter on a school campus or other serious crime at another location. Calls can be targeted to individual people or specific locations by pranksters or malicious actors, but are often used against seemingly random targets as part of a larger trend. Some swatting calls are computer-generated or made using technology to impersonate the caller, making them potentially difficult or impossible to trace.
Schools across the country have been the target of scam active-shooting calls in recent months, which, according to a review by USA TODAY last fall, can amount to 30 in a single week. Calls closed schools, forcing children to hide under desks in panic and parents to flock to campuses.
Experts say the calls drain schools and law enforcement resources and can traumatize communities.
Hardiman said he told the students afterwards: “Some of us are fine. Some of us are going to be really traumatized by what happened, and it’s our responsibility to reach out to each other, to take care of each other.”
Lovell said the origins of the prank call are under investigation. The Danvers Police Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on investigations into Tuesday’s false report and accidental shooting.
St. John’s Prep students were reunited with families after the lockdown and students who fled campus on their own were accommodated, Hardiman said. The school was closed on Tuesday.
USA Today
