False Active-Shooter Report Locks Down East Stroudsburg University in Latest Campus Swatting Case

A false report of an active shooter sent police swarming East Stroudsburg University on Wednesday night, triggering a shelter-in-place order for hundreds of students and reviving a pattern of campus hoax calls that federal investigators have spent more than a year trying to stop.

The 911 call came in to the Pennsylvania State Police Troop N station in Stroudsburg at 7:47 p.m., reporting a gunman on the East Stroudsburg University campus in Monroe County. State and municipal police converged on the campus alongside university officers, conducting door-to-door searches of residence halls as students huddled in locked classrooms and dorm rooms. Hours later, after clearing every building, investigators found no gunman, no gunfire and no victims.

A Call That Sent Officers Running, and Nothing Behind It

University officials said the response would have looked the same regardless of what officers ultimately found. "University Police and local law enforcement agencies will always respond to all emergency calls as valid until proven otherwise," the school said in a statement after the all-clear was issued. State police said the caller has since been identified and is cooperating with investigators, though no charges had been filed as of Thursday morning. The Monroe County District Attorney's Office is assisting with what remains an open case.

The call disrupted a campus of roughly 4,700 undergraduate and graduate students on a Wednesday evening early in the fall semester, a timing that has become grimly familiar. Less than 24 hours earlier and roughly 2,300 miles away, a nearly identical scenario played out at two schools in rural Eureka County, Nevada, when a caller phoned in a threat against Eureka Elementary School. Sheriff's deputies, Nevada State Police and the Nevada Division of Investigation locked down both the elementary and high schools before determining the threat was fabricated.

The Numbers

The two incidents are the latest entries in a count that has grown for more than a year. Roughly 45 college campuses nationwide were struck by false active-shooter reports in the opening weeks of the fall 2025 semester alone, a wave that disrupted an estimated 1.1 million students and cost targeted institutions an estimated $62 million in emergency response, lost instructional time and security upgrades, according to tallies compiled by researchers and news organizations tracking the incidents. At least ten of those calls were traced to a single online network calling itself "Purgatory," which the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania says selected its university targets essentially at random.

Wednesday's call to East Stroudsburg came within hours of the one-year anniversary of that original wave, which began at Villanova University and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga on August 21, 2025, and spread to at least ten more schools — including Iowa State, Northern Arizona and the University of Colorado Boulder — within a matter of days.

How a Prank Call Became a Federal Prosecution Priority

Swatting calls typically rely on internet-based calling services and number-spoofing tools that let a caller anywhere in the world make a 911 dispatcher believe the call is originating from inside the building being targeted, according to an FBI alert on the tactic. Some callers add recorded gunshot sounds to heighten the panic. The bureau has said the calls divert scarce emergency resources from genuine crises and create a serious risk that a real victim, officer or bystander could be injured by a police response mobilized on false pretenses.

Federal prosecutors have brought two significant cases tied to the Purgatory network over the past several months. In May, the Eastern District of Pennsylvania announced charges against a juvenile accused of placing hoax calls to universities during the August 2025 wave. U.S. Attorney David Metcalf said at the time that his office would pursue the cases regardless of who was responsible.

"Federal law enforcement will investigate and prosecute these crimes regardless of who commits them or where they reside."

Separately, prosecutors in Maryland secured a guilty plea from Evan Strauss, a 27-year-old Virginia man identified as an organizer of the Purgatory group, on charges including conspiracy, cyberstalking and threatening to use fire or explosives, in a case brought by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland. Prosecutors say Strauss and his collaborators used Telegram and Instagram to plan and boast about their hoaxes, including one call in which a conspirator told an Albany, New York, police dispatcher he intended to "shoot everybody up" at the city's airport. Strauss is scheduled to be sentenced November 6 and faces up to ten years in prison on the most serious counts. He was separately sentenced to 15 years in a different federal case involving the coercion of a minor.

Campuses Bracing for a Repeat, and No Clear Fix

Neither prosecution appears to have stopped the practice. Colleges recorded scattered swatting incidents throughout the 2025-26 academic year, including a March call that emptied a dining hall and canceled classes at Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport, roughly 90 miles from East Stroudsburg. University police departments have responded by adding verification steps before issuing campus-wide alerts and by leaning more heavily on text and email notification systems, but administrators acknowledge they cannot risk treating any specific call as a hoax before it is confirmed.

That dilemma was evident again in Nevada, where Eureka County Sheriff Miles Umina pledged a full investigation even as his office acknowledged the threat had already been disproven. "ECSO treats any threat to our children and community as our top priority," Umina said in a statement released by the department. "ECSO will exhaust all avenues to find the person responsible, and Eureka County will prosecute them."

At East Stroudsburg, students described a familiar mix of confusion and fear as the lockdown unfolded. Some learned of the shelter-in-place order mid-class through a university email; others said they first realized something was wrong when they saw clusters of patrol cars near residence halls. The Pennsylvania State Police said its investigation into the specific call remains active, and it is not yet clear whether the person identified as the caller will face state charges, federal charges under the same statutes used against Purgatory defendants, or both. A spokesperson for the university said counseling resources remained available to students following the incident.

For now, the case joins a growing docket of unresolved swatting investigations nationwide, one that federal prosecutors have signaled they intend to keep pursuing even as new incidents continue to outpace the cases working their way through court. Strauss's sentencing in November will offer the clearest signal yet of how severely the courts are prepared to punish organizers of the hoaxes, at a moment when the calls themselves show no sign of slowing.