Johnson County Community College sends campus alert ‘shots fired.’ It was a mistake

Students, faculty and staff at Johnson County Community College started their Saturday morning with a frightening alert sent by the school to their phones and emails.

“Stay clear of OCB,” meaning office and classroom buildings, the alert read. “Shots fired. Police have arrived on scene stand by for more information.”

The problem was, it was a mistake. No shots were being fired. There was no danger to students or faculty. The campus had been doing a training with its emergency alert system and mistakenly sent out a “shots fired” message.

“Everybody got it,” Chris Gray, the college’s vice president of communications, said of the message. “Of course my phone and the president’s and others started to explode.”

The message went out at 8:37 a.m. The error was noticed immediately. The college sent out three corrective messages within minutes. It later sent out a tweet explaining matters. “We regret any fear and concern it may have caused,” the tweet said.

“It was human error,” Gray said. “When that went out, it was less than a minute to being corrected.”

Gray sent out an email to faculty, staff and students explaining what happened. “It says essentially that you were unfortunately awakened by a false alarm of a situation on campus,” Gray said.

On the bright side, they know their system works.