Shelton High targeted in shooting hoax

Law enforcement arrived at school in 3 minutes

Matt Baide | May 18, 20230

Shelton Police, Mason County Sheriff’s Office, Squaxin Island Police and Skokomish Police responded to what turned out to be a false account of a student with a gun at Shelton High School.

According to the City of Shelton social media, the original call Thursday morning stated a student was in the parking lot with an AR-15. Police responded, searched the area and found no sign of a suspect or a shooting. The Shelton School District was given the all-clear just before noon.

There were similar “swatting” calls reported the same morning at Aberdeen High School and W.F. West High School in Chehalis.

Shelton Police Chief Carole Beason and Sheriff Ryan Spurling posted a video to social media later in the day to provide an update.

“A caller called in and said they had been treated poorly and that they were at Shelton High School, armed with an AR-15 rifle and they were going to shoot everyone on campus,” Beason said. “In the background, they could hear what sounded like shooting so we thought this was going to be a real active-shooter situation. I want to reiterate to you, this incident ended up being a hoax.”

Spurling said the response began at 10:15 a.m. when dispatch got the call and said they had officers on the scene and entering the school within three minutes. The SWAT teams were activated and about 25 officers responded. Spurling said it took almost 90 minutes to clear the scene.

“While we are very fortunate this incident had been a hoax, we thought this was a great opportunity to talk about what you, people in the community, can do if this were a real active-shooter situation to make our lives easier,” Beason said during the video. “We understand as parents if you know there is some incident going on at the school, your first reaction is you want to be down there and go and get your child, we understand that. We have officers as they were responding to this incident today getting calls from their children on campus that something was going on at the school. I would like to urge you to please wait if something is going on at your child’s school until you’re notified that it is OK to come there. The reason being is when we’re responding to these types of calls, we don’t know who we’re looking for and every person that we come in contact with, we are going to challenge them to see if they’re the person involved in this incident. The more people that show up there, the more of our resources we have to divert from our tactical initiation to the scene to cover all these other folks to keep them from being part of this.”

Spurling said there was another incident where “a citizen flew a drone over the scene.”

“We don’t know if that is somebody inside who is involved with the active shooter, viewing where the officers responding are and using that as a tactical tool,” Spurling said during the video. “If my officer had a 40 millimeter, he would have shot that drone down. Please do not fly over that because we don’t know what we’re dealing with initially and we have to take into consideration everything that we see. Our first priority, and I’ve got to tell you, we’re super proud of our officers, they went straight in, because if there was an active shooter, their whole job was to stop that active shooter and save kids’ lives, they did exactly the right thing. They controlled the scene, we had all ranks going in, securing the perimeter. It was an all-team effort but please don’t fly your drones over and if you do, more than likely, it’s probably going to be taken down.”

Beason said once the response was over, every officer who responded to the scene was debriefed together.

“We had some valuable insights from that because even though we did a good job in responding to this being there in a timely manner, there’s always room for improvement so we’re going to take this opportunity to get better and in the aftermath, we’re going to go and talk to the school about ways we can coordinate our efforts better so we can be better partners to ensure the safety of your children if god forbid, this ever ended up being a real situation here. I am very proud of how our law enforcement responded to this and thank god it was a hoax today, but you can be proud to know that when we thought it was real, we treated it like it was real and they did you proud today. They all went in as if it was real. Luckily, it ended up being a hoax. We want to make sure you guys know what you can do to help us so if it is real, we can do the very best job to keep your children safe.”

MCSO Chief Deputy of Operations Jason Dracobly told the Journal that Thursday was “extremely busy” for the department.

“The swatting was time consuming,” Dracobly said. “We figured out early it’s a swatting but we have to go through the protocols and secure the facility and go from there. The other calls, I don’t know what they all were, but with the nice weather comes the disturbances. It’s weird.”

When it comes to these type of incidents, he said it is always scary.

“You worry about the kids. You worry about what’s going to happen to employees,” Dracobly said. “It’s a scary situation in today’s world. You don’t know if it’s real but you treat it as if it’s real until it’s not real.”