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Video shows moment officer’s gun accidentally went off during St. John’s Prep swatting incident
St. John's Prep in Danvers was the target of a hoax, or swatting call, in May.
In May, students and staff evacuated St. John’s Preparatory School in Danvers, flooding into nearby woods to avoid the possibility of facing a gunman roaming the halls of the school.
As it turned out, there was no armed intruder at St. John’s. The Catholic school was just the latest Massachusetts institution to fall victim to swatting, hoax calls designed to initiate major responses from law enforcement.
One bullet was discharged inside St. John’s that day, accidentally fired by a Danvers Police officer attempting to holster his gun. No one was injured. Now, surveillance video has surfaced of the accidental discharge.
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In the video, obtained by 7News and posted on Twitter, an officer can be seen walking through a bathroom door inside Brother Benjamin Hall. As he rounded a corner, the officer quickly tried to holster his gun and fired it towards the ground. Two other officers were only a foot or two away from him.
The officers appeared to talk about the discharge, and the officer who fired his weapon can be seen checking his holster. Another officer patted him on the shoulder before continuing on.
After the incident, Chief James P. Lovell said that the accidental discharge triggered a larger law enforcement response.
MORE ON 'SWATTING':
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Danvers officer accidentally fires gun during ‘swatting’ incident at St. John’s Prep; BC High also receives hoax call
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‘The most terrifying 20 minutes of my life’: How swatting is affecting Mass. communities and what authorities can do to help
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At least 28 Mass. schools targeted with hoax shooting calls
“Our initial response was a small response of our patrol force,” he said at the time. “Due to the accidental discharge, that’s what really kind of ramped up the response. Typically we would have probably just kept our patrol force investigating initially, but when we had that report we didn’t know where it happened originally or how it occurred, so we had a large response.”
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Although the incident was revealed to be a hoax in less than an hour, the St. John’s community was traumatized nonetheless, forced to confront a fear that hangs over schools across America. More school shootings occurred in the 2020-21 school year than in any other since the turn of the millennium, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The FBI first warned about swatting in 2008. Not only does the act preoccupy highly-trained responders who could be handling real emergencies, it can pose a danger to unsuspecting people caught in the middle of the hoax. The FBI recently formed a national online database to make sharing information about swatting incidents easier for law enforcement officials.
Swatting happens all over the country, but Massachusetts schools have been the subject of a troubling trend recently.
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