A false emergency call reporting a hostage situation and potential active shooter at Claremont McKenna College led to a tense, hours-long lockdown across the Claremont Colleges on Thursday evening, leaving students shaken as police conducted a search of the campuses.
As alerts from Claremont Colleges Services began circulating at 4:55 p.m., warning of police activity and a possible active shooter, students scrambled to find safe shelter. Some locked themselves in dorm rooms and classrooms, while others ran in fear, seeking safety. The lockdown lasted more than two hours before a final notification at 7:36 p.m. confirmed that there was no active threat.
Arjun Vohra CM ’28 said he was in his dorm with his roommate when he received the first notification that there was police activity on CMC campus. When Vohra received an alert about a potential shooter around 10 minutes later, he ran to the senior apartments and drove to the Claremont Village with mutual friends.
“I was quite shocked, obviously, and I didn’t have much time to think about what to do,” Vohra wrote in a correspondence with TSL. “I think in critical situations like these you have to do the first action that comes to mind, and the first action that came to my mind was to run.”
Hasseit Bekele PO ’28 described the incident as an “eye-opening experience.” She said she received the first notification while in her dorm at Blaisdell but decided to walk to Frank Dining Hall where her friends were because she did not want to be alone.
“It was stressful walking out knowing that there was a lockdown and walking into Frank, you could feel the tension,” Bekele said. “Everyone was nervous. The staff told us not to leave, and it was like we were stuck there.”
Bekele said that being with her friends made the situation feel a lot better.
“We were all trying to have a positive mindset, watching videos, laughing, but we also were checking in on our friends we knew were far away,” she said.
During the lockdown, students were communicating on Fizz, a social media platform on which students can post in an anonymous forum private to their college, about the situation. Bekele said a post had suggested that the shooter was close to Frank, leading some students there to start panicking.
“There was a lot of disorder, and everyone started running toward the door,” she said. “When me and my friends saw everyone running, we decided to follow. We ran and ended up going to the security across the street from campus.”
Unlike Bekele, Issac Warshaw PO ’25 spent the duration of the lockdown with people he did not know. Warshaw said he was studying in Pomona’s Walker Hall when he got a text from his friend saying that there was a lot of police activity on campus.
“It was very surprising,” he said. “I looked out the window and saw that there were tons of policemen with big guns. It was very surprising.”
Warshaw said he went outside to where they were and was directed by a campus safety official to go inside a building. He went back into Walker and decided to go into a private bathroom on the second floor with two other students, who were also in the building.
Warshaw said that while he was concerned, he was not that scared because of the number of police he saw.
“I thought that if there were so many police, and the potential gunman was at CMC, they would have to pass through a barricade of police to get to me in Walker Hall,” he said. “I thought it was unlikely they would be able to get to me.”
As time went by after receiving the initial notification, multiple students said they began to become confused.
“I started to become flustered after a good amount of time passed,” Warshaw said. “I thought two hours to find someone seemed a little bit absurd.”
For Maya Raphael PZ ’27, the series of notifications from Campus Security caused a conflicting range of emotions. She said she received the first notification when she was about to nap.
“I spent the next few hours anxiously awaiting updates about the threat instead, thinking there was an active shooter,” Raphael said. “Finding out about the swatting was relieving in one sense, but also frustrating given the extreme apprehension everyone was experiencing for so many hours.”
At 7:36 p.m., campus security sent a notification to students telling them that no evidence of any threats was found. According to a Claremont police news release statement, someone had called saying that they were holding a person hostage in a CMC restroom and claiming to have a bomb and a rifle.
Bekele said, “When I figured out it was a hoax, I was really confused because we were getting notifications directly from the school about the legitimacy of the situation, and obviously they had to take the precautions, but in the moment, the sudden switch between serious notifications to realizing it was a hoax was really weird.”
Vohra wrote that the notification was relieving.
“I would rather it be someone playing pranks on a phone than someone showing up to campus with a firearm,” he said.
Warshaw said he thought the police did an overall good job of addressing the situation.
“The length of the lockdown was a little disconcerting in the moment,” he said, “but now that we know it was a hoax, it seemed as though they just wanted to ensure there was no threat and spent a lot of time securing campus.”
Some students described receiving frantic messages from friends and family as they sheltered in place.
“I was in contact with my mom, and she was super stressed, especially because she was not getting direct notifications from the school,” Bekele said. “My mom wanted to be more in contact.”
Vohra also wrote that he wished there was more communication and transparency throughout the situation. He also noted that he was not exactly sure what to do.
“I wasn’t even expecting such a situation to arise, let alone plan for it,” Vohra wrote. “I don’t think the school has done a sufficient job in preparing us for urgent evacuations or lockdowns, but again, this type of situation is so unprecedented.”
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