False report of shooter prompts shooting involving US Naval Academy student

The US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, was placed under lockdown on Sept 11 after a post on an anonymous chat platform set off concerns that an active shooter was roaming the campus, military officials said.

The threat was traced to a laptop belonging to a midshipman who had left the academy and was confirmed to be in his parents’ house in the Midwest, officials said. No active shooter was believed to have been present on the campus.

The false report, coming at a moment of heightened tension nationwide, provoked a flood of misinformation on social media and led to an altercation between a law enforcement officer and a midshipman, injuring both.

Amid the initial chaos and confusion on campus, the midshipman mistook a law enforcement officer for the shooter and struck him in the head with a parade rifle. The law enforcement officer then fired at the midshipman, wounding him in the arm, the officials said.

Both the midshipman and the law enforcement officer were stable and receiving treatment, the officials said.

The false reports and violence came one day after Mr Charlie Kirk, the charismatic founder of a right-wing youth activist group, was fatally shot while speaking on a college campus in Utah.

Hours before the Naval Academy went into lockdown, there was an apparently false report of an active shooter at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Around 5pm on Sept 11, the police confirmed there was no ongoing threat on campus.

During the lockdown in Annapolis, ambulances gathered at a staging area at the rear gate to the campus and began moving forward. The campus was mostly silent, except for the whirring helicopter overhead.

A nearby military base, Naval Support Activity Annapolis, which provides security and other support for the academy, also responded to the initial false reports of a shooting.

The US Naval Academy, located on the banks of the Severn River, is a four-year college that prepares students, called midshipmen, to be commissioned as officers in the US Navy and Marine Corps.

According to the school’s website, about 4,400 midshipmen are enrolled there.

E-mails shared with The New York Times show that an academy midshipman who was standing watch had warned students: “Get inside and lock your door right now. Not a drill. Get inside and lock your door.”

About 20 minutes later, school official David Forman said in an e-mail to midshipmen that there were no confirmed reports of gunfire and cautioned against making unconfirmed reports. NYTIMES