The Hamilton Spectator
(Jul 11, 2009)
"Check the news. Police have us in the gym. There's a guy with a gun."
-- Text from Bianca, 17, to her mom during a lockdown at Bishop Ryan high school yesterday
We give our kids cellphones in case of an emergency.
We want them to be able to contact 911. Or us.
We are comforted knowing we can communicate with them in a crisis. Yesterday there was a crisis. Born out of a hoax. And the cellphones just made it worse.
A growing group of worried parents flocked to strip malls, street corners and parking lots surrounding Bishop Ryan school just after 8 a.m. Most were drawn by a flurry of text messages from students, other parents and friends.
Something bad is happening at BR. Police are there.
Parents -- some of whom had just dropped off their children at the east Hamilton school for summer school or volleyball camp moments earlier -- raced back. They found streets blocked by at least a half-dozen cruisers, lights flashing. They saw the heavily armed tactical Emergency Response Unit going in.
Anxiety began to turn to panic.
"There's been a shooting," came the text from 16-year-old Josh. His mom Lori rushed from Fortino's to the school.
"I'm nervous," she said, standing as close to school property as police would allow. She held her cell and glanced at it often.
Officers guarding the perimeter couldn't -- or wouldn't -- give parents information. More moms and dads arrived by the moment. Some parked their cars in the first place they could -- blocking in whole parking lots of vehicles -- so they could run closer to the school.
Virtually all the parents worked their phones, desperately trying to both gather information and reassure their children. But really, the bulk of information flowing from phone to phone was wrong. Worse than wrong. Wildly off-base.
Rather than reassure, it just created more fear.
"We've heard someone was shot," one mom said. "We've heard there's a guy with a gun."
"I've heard there's someone with a gun, too," another mom echoed.
Here are the facts according to Inspector J. Anderson:
At 8:03 a.m. police received a 911 call from a man who claimed to have seen a young man with a handgun entering Bishop Ryan.
The first police officers arrived two minutes later.
The school was ordered into lockdown. At first, all 500 or so students were kept in their classrooms. When the ERU arrived and swept the school for a gunman, they moved students into the gym as they cleared each classroom.
At one point, the ERU found a boy in a second-floor bathroom. Not knowing who he was and given that he resembled a description of the gunman from the 911 caller, the boy was handcuffed and taken out of the school. It was quickly determined he was simply a student doing everything he'd been taught to do in a lockdown. He hid in the nearest safe room -- the bathroom.
Unfortunately, when the innocent kid was brought out in handcuffs by police, the crowd of parents jumped to conclusions.
He's the shooter.
In fact, nobody was shot. There were never any shots fired. There was no gun. And there was no shooter. Nobody was arrested.
"This was a bogus call," says Anderson.
Now police -- who had more than 20 officers at the scene for two hours -- are looking to charge someone for making the call.
I interviewed Anderson at the scene in sight of a crowd of parents. When I finished, I crossed the street to where the parents stood. They peppered me with questions.
I told them everything Anderson had said.
They didn't believe it.
The information I was giving them didn't jive with what they were getting from their children inside. Or with the rumours. Or even, it seemed, with what they had seen with their own eyes.
"No arrests? But we saw the kid in handcuffs ... "
Ironically, in the tote bag I carried, alongside my own BlackBerry and reporter's notebooks, is a copy of the book I'm reading right now, Columbine, by journalist Dave Cullen.
Though nobody said that word yesterday, I'm sure a lot of us were thinking it.
The Columbine horror unfolded 10 years ago. That day, students inside the school and parents on the outside passed around cellphones to try calling their loved ones.
It was the first mass shooting in North America to be talked about and reported on as it happened, thanks to technology. Hindsight tells us much of that information was incorrect. Rumours and speculation generated in the midst of the chaos were perpetuated and sometimes remained as fact for years until being debunked with thorough investigations by police and journalists.
Now nobody needs to share a cellphone. They're ubiquitous.
And so is the misinformation.
Susan Clairmont's commentary appears regularly in The Spectator.
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