‘Remarkably similar’ accents described in school shooting hoax calls across SC
Several of the 911 phone calls making false reports of school shootings in more than a dozen South Carolina counties last week bore striking similarities, multiple law enforcement agencies say.
The similarities, which include similar voice accents and possibly computer-altered voices, may be further evidence of coordination behind the string of false shooting reports on Oct. 5 that scared parents, unnerved students and had sheriff’s departments across the state scrambling.
Clusters of false school shooting calls have been reported in numerous other states — including Minnesota, Louisiana, Virginia and, just this week, Florida — with some reports suggesting coordinated efforts may have originated in another country. S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster also has said the calls in this state may have come from outside the country.
Numerous South Carolina law enforcement agencies now say they’ve turned over to the FBI evidence from the hoax calls made last week. A spokesperson for the FBI’s Columbia office said they were unable to comment on any ongoing investigation.
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, who originally characterized the hoax calls as the product of a TikTok trend, declined to comment further on the case, citing an ongoing FBI probe.
“RCSD’s case is a part of that bigger investigation, and we have cooperated with all state and federal agency investigations,” said a sheriff’s office spokesperson.
Lott’s agency on Tuesday released the audio recording of a 911 call reporting an active shooter at Blythewood High School last Wednesday. In the recording, a man’s voice can be heard initially repeating, “Hello, hello” and, “Can you hear me?” several times. The voice speaks with a heavy accent and tells the dispatcher that there is an active shooter at Blythewood High School. The caller continues to repeat “hello” throughout much of the static-laden recording.
At one point in the nearly three-minute recording, the caller says he is located in classroom 118 on the second floor of the school and that the shooting was happening in the room next door. When asked for his name, the caller identifies himself as Robert Paul.
Some 150 law enforcement officers descended on Blythewood High in response to the call, which soon was determined to be a hoax.
Other law enforcement agencies around the state quickly learned that day that false calls were spreading.
Newberry County Sheriff Lee Foster said his agency already had a heads-up about the fake calls when they received a report of a shooting at Newberry Middle School.
Officers were deployed to the school, though the agency’s response was “somewhat tempered in that we had a reasonable assumption that it was fake,” Foster said. “We had gotten a call from the FBI and we had received communications from (the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division) that this was going on, so we pushed that out to all our supervisors. But we still responded, and the school was placed on lockdown.”
Foster said Tuesday that his agency had turned over its audio files of the shooting report to the FBI and could not provide them to the media, but he described what he heard on the call as “remarkably similar to the one in Richland County.”
“My personal opinion after listening to it is that the voice is altered electronically. I don’t think the voice on there is the natural voice of the caller,” Foster said. He also said the caller’s voice had a strong accent similar to the Richland County caller. The Newberry County caller did not give a name to dispatchers.
In Chesterfield County, calls reporting shootings at Central High School and Chesterfield High School followed a similar pattern.
“It sounded like it was a computer-generated voice,’’ Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Department Capt. John Vaughn said, noting that “it takes a strange person to make something up that’s not real.’’
Vaughn said much of the sheriff’s department responded when the calls came in, but it did not take long to determine that the information was false. The sheriff’s department contacted the schools and confirmed the reports were not accurate.
The Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Department has been in touch with SLED, he said.
“You have a fake call come in and we are having to respond. We had emotions, too, trying to get there, thinking it was an active shooter situation,’’ Vaughn said.
In Chester County, calls came in about 15 minutes apart reporting active shootings at Chester High School and Great Falls High School, according to sheriff’s office spokesman Grant Suskin.
Suskin said it appeared to be the same male caller with a thick accent both times. The calls did not come from a local number, and no name was given to dispatchers.
“The caller was continually talking over our dispatcher because he was reading a script,” Suskin said in an email to The State.
Suskin also said the caller “described a location on the school’s campus that did not exist.”
Audio of the calls would not be released to the media because the calls are under investigation, Suskin said.
False shooting reports targeted at least 20 middle and high schools in 15 counties on Oct. 5. The State newspaper has requested audio of the calls from 11 law enforcement agencies besides Richland County, and at least four said the calls would not be released because they are under investigation.
SLED, which has confirmed that it is actively investigating the hoax calls along with federal and local-level law enforcement, has emphasized that every threat to a school must be taken seriously.
“While at this time the threats are believed to be a hoax, SLED encourages everyone to continue to take any and all threats seriously,” said Renee Wunderlich, the agency’s public information director. “If you have information on a threat, report it to local law enforcement.”
Ted Clifford and Alexa Jurado contributed reporting.
This story was originally published October 14, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
