Hoax Threat Locks Down San Antonio Elementary as Police Search for Suspect

The morning drop-off rush had barely ended at Royal Ridge Elementary School when Christopher French noticed a line of police vehicles racing past him on San Antonio’s Northeast Side.

“Three of the white trucks flew by and then about six more of the SAPD squad cars flew by as well,” French said. “I said, ‘Yeah, there’s something going on.’”

By the time he turned his car around and headed back toward his children’s school, the campus was locked down. Classroom doors were shut and secured. Police officers were moving room to room, searching for a gunman no one could find.

Lockdown sparked by anonymous call

It began shortly after 8 a.m. Wednesday, Jan. 21, when someone called North East Independent School District and claimed to be hiding in a bathroom at Royal Ridge Elementary with plans to “shoot up the school,” district officials said. The caller did not give a name and hung up.

District leaders ordered an immediate lockdown at the prekindergarten-through-fifth-grade campus near Randolph Boulevard and Weidner Road. Students and staff sheltered in place while North East ISD police and San Antonio police officers converged on the school.

Following current school safety protocols, no one was allowed to enter or leave the building as officers began a systematic search.

“We found out that there were several classrooms that had adjoining restrooms inside the classrooms,” NEISD Police Chief Wally McCampbell told local station KSAT-TV. “So what we did is we went ahead and proceeded to search each classroom.”

Officers went through roughly 30 rooms, focusing on areas with attached restrooms that could match the caller’s description. Police remained on campus for more than an hour while families watched from the street or waited for updates on their phones.

Inside, students listened as unfamiliar voices and heavy footsteps moved down the halls.

“I heard police going into the classroom next door, and then I didn’t know what was happening,” student Jax Villagomez told KSAT. “So I was, like, scared.”

By late morning, officers had searched the interior and exterior of the school and found no suspect, no weapon and no signs of an attempted attack. The district lifted the lockdown and allowed classes to resume.

District: Incident appears to be a hoax

In messages to families later that day, NEISD said investigators now believe the incident was a hoax.

“The caller did not identify themselves and hung up,” the district said in an update. “Campus police and the San Antonio Police Department searched the interior and exterior of the school but did not find anything. Police suspect this was a prank call, and will continue to investigate.”

The district pledged that whoever is responsible “will face serious criminal charges.”

McCampbell said investigators do not believe the voice on the line belonged to a child.

“It was an adult voice,” he said. “It’s just somebody who just really likes to cause a bunch of chaos.”

No arrests have been announced, and police have not publicly said whether they believe the caller was local or out of state.

Legal consequences can be severe

Under Texas law, a hoax threat to a school can bring felony charges even if no one is physically injured. The state’s false alarm or report statute makes it a crime to knowingly circulate a false report of an emergency likely to cause action by an emergency agency or disrupt a public place. When the report involves a public primary or secondary school, the offense is a state jail felony, punishable by up to two years in a state jail facility.

Texas lawmakers have also carved out a specific crime for “swatting” — the practice of making a false report designed to trigger an armed law enforcement response — with penalties that can increase if someone is hurt during the response. Federal prosecutors can separately bring charges under a statute that covers hoaxes related to violent crimes and terrorism, carrying potential prison time even when no attack occurs.

Part of a broader pattern of school swatting

District officials say the threat at Royal Ridge fits into a pattern they have been tracking.

National school safety researchers have documented a recent surge in swatting and hoax shooting calls aimed at K-12 campuses. One nonprofit, the Educator’s School Safety Network, has reported that in the 2022–23 school year nearly two-thirds of documented “violent incidents” in schools were actually false active-shooter reports, far outnumbering real shootings.

An analysis of federal data and public reports by K-12 news outlet K-12 Dive identified hundreds of school swatting incidents in 2023 alone, with spikes where multiple districts across a state or region received coordinated false reports in the same week or even the same day.

Texas has seen several such waves. Earlier this month, districts in North Texas, including Dallas and Fort Worth, dealt with what one administrator described as a “rash of threats” — bomb scares, anonymous messages and social media posts — that put campuses into secure or lockdown status before being deemed unfounded. FBI officials in the Houston area have said threats against schools there have more than tripled in a single school year.

In some cases, investigators have traced threats to out-of-state callers. Last year, authorities in New York arrested a 16-year-old from Brooklyn accused of making hoax and swatting calls targeting schools and law enforcement agencies in Texas and Florida, including Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and San Antonio-area institutions.

Emotional toll and lingering impacts

The exact motive in the Royal Ridge case remains unclear. What is clear is that, for students, staff and families, the experience felt real.

“This is absolutely not what you want to drive by your kids’ school and see,” French said, recalling the line of emergency vehicles outside the campus.

Mental health experts say those reactions are common. In interviews about similar incidents, psychologists have said that repeated lockdowns and threats — even when they end without shots fired — can leave children feeling constantly under threat, contributing to anxiety, sleep problems and reluctance to go to school. Younger students in particular may struggle to distinguish between drills, hoaxes and genuine emergencies.

Texas law requires public schools to conduct at least two lockdown drills each year, along with other exercises such as fire and evacuation drills. A 2023 review by KSAT found that North East ISD was among districts that had not fully met state lockdown drill guidelines at some campuses, an issue that district officials said they were correcting.

At Royal Ridge, the lockdown procedures were suddenly tested not in a scheduled drill but in the middle of a school day.

The campus followed standard guidance: doors locked, students sheltered, outside access restricted, communications with parents sent in stages. The district has said counseling will be available for students and staff who need support.

School safety advocates warn that swatting incidents carry another risk: desensitization. If students and staff repeatedly experience threats that turn out to be false, they may become less likely to take future alerts seriously. Yet districts say they cannot afford to treat any credible-sounding threat as likely fake — a tension that leaves communities with few easy options.

A tense moment for a district under pressure

The scare at Royal Ridge also lands at a transitional moment for North East ISD. Facing declining enrollment and a projected tens-of-millions-dollar budget shortfall, the district’s board voted last year to close three campuses after this school year and reassign students. Royal Ridge is one of the schools slated to absorb children from a closing elementary campus, which will increase its enrollment.

For now, classes at Royal Ridge have resumed, but the investigation into the anonymous call continues. Police have not released recordings or described any technological clues that might identify the caller.

The voice that claimed to be hiding in a school bathroom is gone. For the hundreds of children who huddled behind classroom doors and the parents who raced back to the campus, the memory of that morning — and the knowledge that it was all a hoax — is likely to linger much longer.