A report of shots fired sent law enforcement racing to Indian Lake Central School on Thursday morning, triggering a tense search of the building before investigators determined there was no actual threat. New York State Police said the incident was a swatting hoax, meaning someone placed a false report designed to trigger an emergency response.
State Police confirmed they received the report and responded to the school in Indian Lake, New York on Thursday, according to WRGB. The station reported that law enforcement personnel searched and secured the school after the shots-fired call came in, and that school officials told investigators no shots had actually been fired. The Hamilton County Sheriff's Office also responded to the school that same day, per the station's report.
Troopers later said their investigation turned up nothing to back up the report. “The investigation determined that there was no threat to the school and confirmed the incident was a swatting hoax,” New York State Police said in an update. The agency added that school officials were establishing a reunification process and notifying parents of the incident, though further details on how that process played out were not provided.
A Separate Swatting Scare This Month
Indian Lake's ordeal came exactly two weeks after a strikingly similar hoax rattled Hamilton Central School in Madison County. On October 8, Madison County sheriff's deputies responded after a 911 call claimed someone with firearms was entering the school and planned to conduct a shooting, according to the Oneida Dispatch. Deputies methodically cleared the building and found no threats present, and no students or staff were injured, the outlet reported.
That response put Hamilton Central School on lockdown and prompted nearby residents to shelter in place after receiving reverse 911 alerts, the same outlet later reported. On October 18, the Madison County Sheriff's Office announced the arrest of 18-year-old Georgia Leduc of Binghamton, a former Hamilton Central School District student, in connection with the hoax call. Deputies charged Leduc with making a terroristic threat and first-degree falsely reporting an incident, both described as Class D felonies, according to the same report. As of October 9, investigators said the probe into the origin of that 911 call remained ongoing.
No comparable arrest or suspect identification has been announced in connection with the Indian Lake report, and the sequence of that department's investigation beyond the state police statement has not been detailed publicly.
Swatting Treated as a Growing National Problem
Authorities have increasingly described swatting as a persistent threat facing schools well beyond the Adirondacks. The U.S. Department of Education, in guidance addressing the issue, said “anonymized threats are a growing problem for colleges, universities, and K-12 schools.” The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center has likewise said it “takes swatting threats seriously and coordinates with federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement partners to respond to and investigate these incidents.”
A Congressional Research Service report noted that school districts in New York and several other states were subject to threatening hoax calls characterized as swatting in September 2023. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has previously said more than 50 school districts across the state received disturbing swatting threats in a single day, and U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer has pointed to an earlier case in which police had to respond to over 220 K-12 schools statewide after false reports of a mass shooting on March 30, 2023.
Indian Lake Central School has faced building-wide alerts before. In May 2022, the school went on a precautionary lockout after an alleged threat and racial slur involving a student's parent and neighbors, according to North Country Public Radio; police said at the time that no one at the school was in danger. Elsewhere, similar false alarms have hit schools outside New York, including a case at Mason High School where Mason City Schools said a suspicious phone call to dispatchers was quickly identified as a swatting incident with no credible threat found, according to WLWT.
