'It's nerve wracking because you’re helpless': Fake active shooter report causes real trauma

As Pensacola Catholic High School teachers spent the better part of Wednesday’s school day handling the fallout from the false threat of an active shooter, parents and students are still recovering from the emotional distress that unfolded in the high school’s halls.

Law enforcement agencies were tipped off to a possible active shooter situation at Pensacola Catholic High School on Wednesday, and both the Escambia County Sheriff's Office and the Pensacola Police Department responded immediately to the school with a heavy police presence.

“At about 11:35 a.m., teachers, faculty members who were in the cafeteria saw sheriff’s deputies coming to the campus with guns drawn," said Pensacola Catholic High School Principal Kierstin Martin. "They called the office, and we immediately called a code red, which means lock down the entire campus, and that’s what happened. The officers came in and explained to us that there was an alarm that there was a perpetrator on the property.”

The code red directed teachers to lock their doors and herd students into a corner farthest away from windows, and armed officers went room to room in search of a potential shooter.

“Deputies took our keys and walked to each door to check each room, (to) make sure there was no one in the building and everything was safe,” Martin said.

An emergency alert went out to cell phones in the area, including those in the school. "Active Shooter reported in your area, run, hide or fight." Almost simultaneously parents' phones lit up with messages from panicked children.

Within half an hour the threat was determined to be unfounded, but for the staff, parents and students, time slowed to a crawl.

Pensacola Catholic High receives threatActive shooter report at Pensacola Catholic High School is false alarm

Student text messages tell the story

Gulf Coast Minority Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Brian Wyer said his daughter, a senior at Pensacola Catholic High School, was in class at the time of incident.

As his daughter’s classroom prepared for lock-down, she texted her father a screenshot of the alert flashing across her cell phone that an active shooter was in her area.

Soon, armed sheriff’s deputies entered and searched her classroom.

Multiple parents and students said after the incident that the first thing they noticed when deputies arrived was their guns - and they knew it was no drill. Even after she was found safe by police, Wyer's daughter was still rattled. She texted her family that she saw her life flash before her eyes.

In text messages to her father, she wrote her “heart is racing” and that “the gun scared me so bad.”

Despite the alarming messages Wyer received, he felt comfort knowing his daughter had her phone available so he could get a handle on what was going on within the school. Even so, he felt helpless.

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“Being a parent in this day and age, we encourage our kids to make sure they have their phones,” he said. “Any time I see a text from my kids telling me they need me — I check it and respond. I was in the middle of a meeting, but I know when I get a text from her, especially in the middle of the day, something must be going wrong.”

Everything in that meeting stopped and everyone’s minds went straight to their families.

“I think the scariest part is that — I thought there was an active shooter in the room,” he recalled. “Personally, I’m very angry (about) the fact that some person called a false alarm like this. The kids are freaking out, the teachers go in emergency mode, the disruption in the school day. I hope this person is caught, whoever did this.”

The county's emergency response system sent out a second text about 30 minutes after the first announcing the situation was all clear.

The school sent a mass text message at 1:21 p.m. informing parents of the situation that had unfolded.

“It was nerve-wracking. You still don’t know if you should go get your child, if they are OK or not,” he said. “Seeing all the (stories in the news) make you realize that this can happen in your own backyard. It’s not the big cities, it can be a small town, small place that are going to have these kinds of things happen. It’s nerve-wracking because you’re helpless.”

Even though there was no physical harm to the students, he said, emotionally, there will still be some work to be done.

“I think they need understanding from the teachers, reassurance that they were told they did everything right,” he said.

Lockdown takes emotional toll

The school-administered text message instructed parents to leave their children at the school since the situation was under control. However, several parents still made the decision to take their children home early for the day.

Catholic High School parent Stephanie Smith, who was among the parents to receive alarming text messages from her son, made the decision to take her son home.

“I felt like there probably was an active shooter. I know they do drills all the time in our area, but to actually get that alert was when the panic set in as a parent,” Smith said. “I think moving forward they probably need to come up with some type of system to give parents a little bit more reassurance more quickly. I know probably school-wise they are thinking during the actual lockdown, it’s probably very hard to get kids not to text their parents, because there is not a lot of information, but kids are going to text their parents if they’re afraid. If they’re scared.”

Even though the threat was unfounded, she could hear by the tone of her son’s voice that he was far from OK.

“As soon as he said it was all-clear, I asked if he could call me because he was very upset and freaked out. Panic attack,” she said. “As soon as I was able to speak to him on the phone, I said, ‘I want to come get you. Mom’s on her way.’”

Moving on from the event, Smith suspects teachers may be met with increased emotional needs from their students.

“It raised extra concerns as far as how they were going to deal emotionally with someone, and how are they going to now move forward,” she said. “It was obviously not a true active shooter — which is great — but how do we reassure the kids to move on, because school is supposed to be a safe place.”

"Swatting calls are dangerous"

The call reporting an active shooter was determined to be a “swatting” incident. Swatting is the practice of reporting a fraudulent threat or emergency to emergency responders with the intention of drawing a large police response to the victims' location.

"These swatting calls are dangerous, and are not funny," Escambia County Sheriff Chip Simmons said in a statement. "The Escambia County Sheriff’s Office responds and treats all threats as though they are real, and we work quickly to clear the space. This is a felony, and we will charge those that we catch doing something so stupid. Just for clarification, the ECSO did not release an emergency alert during this call, it was released by the Escambia County Emergency Management system."

According to an ECSO spokesperson, the incident remains under investigation, and multiple other counties have received similar calls.

In a mass text sent out to parents, Martin noted that the ECSO praised the school for their handling of the situation.

“Our students and teachers did exactly what a ‘Code Red’ calls for and the deputies praised us highly,” she wrote in the message. “They (ECSO) said that there is now a rash of false emergency calls being made to schools throughout the country.”

Every code red is taken seriously, she said, regardless of whether it is a real threat or a false alarm.

She said she is confident that in the event of a real active shooter, the teachers would be prepared to handle any threat with tried-and-true practices in place.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Active shooter threat at Pensacola Catholic High School causes trauma