Jim Smith, the director of MECCA 911, was on the phone with Chris McIntire, his counterpart in neighboring Marion County, when the obvious realization hit both emergency response professionals at the same time.
Whoa, both said Wednesday morning. We’re getting the same call.
McIntire, the chief of Marion County’s Homeland Security division, was in the middle of the nightmare scenario.
When it came into his dispatch center, the man on the other end, speaking in accented English, said he was a teacher at Fairmont Senior High School — and that several students had just been shot by a man wielding an assault-style weapon.
He told the dispatcher he was barricaded in his classroom, trying to tend to the wounded, who crawled or ran there, trying to save their lives.
Fairmont Senior’s leafy campus has plenty of places for a gunman to hide, and the school also sits in the middle of a tightly packed residential neighborhood.
He had just asked Smith for backup, and MECCA’s director was getting ready to put units on Interstate 79, when one of his dispatchers took a call.
From a man with an accent — who identified himself as a teacher at Morgantown High School.
He was hunkered down in his locked classroom, this caller said, because somebody was walking the halls targeting students with an assault weapon.
A number of victims, bleeding from their wounds, were sprawled in the room, he said.
He was trying to help them, he said.
Please get here, he said.
The unique architecture of MHS also affords plenty of hiding places, and it’s located smack in the middle of South Park.
“We were on the phone with the caller for 3 minutes and 1 second,” Smith said. “He was answering questions, so we knew it was a real person.”
It was also part of a coordinated effort to deceive.
One right after the other
Harrison dispatchers took a call that same morning — with the same narrative and the same delivery — detailing an active shooter at Robert C. Byrd High.
Nine other emergency call centers in nine other counties across the Mountain State reported the same, along with numerous other centers in neighboring Ohio and Kentucky.
In the middle of the MECCA call — it came in at 8:58 a.m. — another line on Smith’s phone lit up.
West Virginia State Police.
Stand down, the person in authority said.
The threat isn’t credible. Everybody’s getting called.
“It was just West Virginia’s turn,” Smith said.
He’s referring to “swatting,” the act of calling 911 and faking an emergency, in order to get large contingents of responders to a scene. If you can get the SWAT team there, it’s even better.
Swatting has been around for a while. Think of it as a high-tech version of say, calling in a bomb threat from a pay phone 50 years ago.
It started out as way to prank someone, either as a joke or revenge, even. (Look at the police pounding your door. That’ll teach you to embarrass me in front of my friends.)
After the mass school shooting in Uvalde last March, swatting became a ruse even more cruel.
Schools and whole school systems have been targeted in recent months, from North Dakota to North Carolina, which fielded 15 swatting calls in one day this past October.
The calls, to date, have always been the same. A male voice with that accent that may, or may not, be somewhat Middle Eastern in nature.
Smith, a policeman by training, didn’t want to speculate.
“It’s tough to pinpoint it and I probably don’t want to say too much anyway.”
Breaking it down
At least the good guys got there in Olympic time, he said. Nine officers were on the scene at MHS four minutes later, at 9:02 a.m., he said.
Fairmont Senior was also swarming with officers within minutes, McIntire reported.
He wasn’t immediately available for comment Thursday, because he was meeting with officials from Marion County Schools to go over the protocols and response from the day before.
In the meantime, Wednesday’s calls across West Virginia came from the same phone number as the other incidents across the U.S., Smith said.
It’s always described as an “out-of-state” number in media accounts, and Smith said the same.
“Yeah, we’re not gonna give that out,” he said, when asked.
However, he did provide it to the West Virginia Fusion Center, the state agency formed in 2008 to investigate criminal and terrorist activity.
Which is as good a definition as any for what happened here and what’s been happening across the nation, Jim Nolan said, after all the units returned to service Wednesday.
Nolan is a former beat cop who researched hate crimes for the FBI on his way to becoming a WVU sociology professor and chair of the department.
“It’s psychological warfare,” he said.
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