Thursday, Feb. 16, 2023 | 7:08 p.m.
School districts and police around the state, including in the Las Vegas area, reported hoax emergency calls of school shootings today.
Boulder City police received a call just before 8 a.m. that a shooter was at Boulder City High School, the city said in a tweet. Officers arrived “almost immediately” after the call and found no shooting, although the school went into hard lockdown until police deemed the threat unfounded. It was the second such “swatting” call at the school since December.
Swatting is the practice of making a malicious prank call making false reports of a crime to police to get a large number of armed officers — including tactical SWAT teams — to swarm a location.
“CCSD takes all threats and rumored threats seriously,” the Clark County School District said in a statement today. “CCSDPD works closely with law enforcement partners to investigate the origin of fake threat calls and posts. As it is illegal to make terroristic threats, anyone who makes a fake threat call may face criminal charges.”
School and law enforcement officials in Nye, Churchill, Elko and Douglas counties also posted to their official social media accounts today about shooting calls and resulting lockdowns.
In Churchill County, Fallon police sent all available officers to Churchill County High School after receiving a call of an imminent shooting and locked down all six of the city’s schools. Elko County sheriff’s deputies responded to Elko High School “within minutes” of receiving a call. The Nye County School District posted an alert to its website that it implemented its "Stay-Put" procedures and the sheriff’s department had extra patrols at schools throughout the day.
In Douglas County, the school district locked down six campuses around Gardnerville and Minden after getting a call about a shooting at Sierra Chef, a business in Genoa that offers cooking classes, from a person saying “that they were entering the ‘school and shooting everyone they see’ with an AR-15 rifle,” the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office said in a press release. Dispatchers heard gunfire sound effects in the background.
Deputies found no indications of a shooting at the business but as a precaution, put several area schools in lockdown.
The department said this is the third hoax report of an active shooting it has received in the past month.
“We are working with the Nevada Threat Analysis Center and the Nevada State Police to help us identify the caller,” Douglas County Sheriff Daniel Coverley said in the statement. “It appears they are using a computer line to hide their identification when placing the calls to our 911 center. This type of misuse of 911 puts the community and the deputies responding at risk. It can also add confusion or cause our 911 center and responding deputies to question the validity of a real incident.”
While it wasn’t clear where the calls originated or if they were a coordinated attack, Gov. Joe Lombardo tweeted that his office was aware of the many reports “and we are actively working with local, state, and federal partners to respond to these incidents.”
