A Spate of Fake Shooting Calls Disrupts College Campuses

Less than an hour after saying his final goodbyes to his son at a dorm at Villanova University, Pedro Gutierrez got a disturbing voice mail at the airport. His son, a freshman, was running to hide from an active shooter reported on campus.

“To be so close and to have left him 45 minutes earlier, the guilt was horrific,” Mr. Gutierrez said.

While Mr. Gutierrez was on his way to get a rental car, trying to get back to campus, he learned the threat was a hoax.

Three days later, Villanova University was the subject of a second active shooter warning, on Sunday during a Catholic Mass, which the police later deemed to be fake. On Monday, students in at least six colleges started the fall semester with lockdowns and warnings to run and hide, until police departments later said that there was no evidence of gunmen or violence. And on Tuesday, the University of Kentucky, Central Georgia Technical College and the University of Texas at San Antonio also received false reports.

In all, over the past week, about a dozen colleges have been the targets of fraudulent reports of active shooters on campus, known as swatting.

“The F.B.I. is seeing an increase in swatting events across the country, and we take potential hoax threats very seriously because it puts innocent people at risk,” according to a statement from the F.B.I. “Knowingly providing false information to emergency service agencies about a possible threat to life drains law enforcement resources, costs thousands of dollars and, most importantly, puts innocent people at risk.”

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