The inside story of the teenager whose “swatting” calls sent armed police racing into hundreds of schools nationwide—and the private detecti

The School Shootings Were Fake. The Terror Was Real

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2025-01-11 00:30:22

The inside story of the teenager whose “swatting” calls sent armed police racing into hundreds of schools nationwide—and the private detective who tracked him down.

Sarah Jones was 11 hours and 49 minutes into her 12-hour shift as an emergency dispatcher for the county sheriff in Spokane, Washington, when she received what she would later describe as the worst phone call of her life.

It was a Wednesday morning in May 2023, around 10 o’clock, when the call—from someone who identified himself only as “Wayne”—came in via a publicly listed regional emergency line. “I’m going to walk into Central Valley High School in Veradale with my AK-47,” Wayne told the operator who first picked up. The voice was unnaturally deep, slow, so claustrophobically close to the microphone that its breath seemed to fill the line. “I’m going to kill everyone I see.”

That operator transferred him to Jones (WIRED has changed her name at her request), a 42-year-old, red-headed mother of three. Jones’ office at the Spokane Regional Emergency Center was chronically understaffed, so she’d been working overtime through that night and morning, drinking Dunkin’ Donuts–branded coffee from the office’s Keurig machine amid the usual marathon of domestic violence and reckless driving reports. Jones had spent years taking 911 calls; only that week she’d been promoted to “law dispatch,” a position that included dealing with callers carrying out crimes in progress—“hot calls,” as dispatchers referred to them. This would be her first.