New 911 Calls Explain Police Response To Lone Peak High School
Oct 29, 2019, 7:24 PM | Updated: 7:28 pm
HIGHLAND, Utah — Utah County dispatchers released a new 911 call to show why they believed there really was a threat happening at Lone Peak High School on Friday.
The case of miscommunication from the Lone Peak Police Department resulted in a swarm of officers responding to Lone Peak High School in Highland on Friday when the initial 911 call was about Highland High School in Salt Lake City.
That call was very clear to Central Utah 911 dispatchers, who transferred it to dispatch in Salt Lake City. But then another call came in about Lone Peak High.
“My daughter texted me saying there was an active shooter at the school,” said a father of a Lone Peak High student during a 911 call that came in at 12:09 p.m. Friday.
The father said his daughter was in a classroom at Lone Peak High School and some students had said there was an active shooter.
“She said some kids came running into the classroom and they had a gun and they were shooting,” the father said in the 911 call.
But little did dispatchers know, that daughter was reacting to officers who were already at Lone Peak High as a result of miscommunication about a man with a gun that was meant for Highland High and not Lone Peak High.
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It was at 11:57 a.m. when dispatchers got a call that was transferred to them from the Lone Peak Police Department talking about a possible gunman at Highland High School. That call was then transferred to Salt Lake City 911 dispatch.
Michael Veenendaal, Central Utah 911 director, said they had no idea the two could have been connected to the same call.
“That information was crossing paths at the exact same time so to us those two things become a credible threat and so we just continue on the process,” Veenendaal said. “We take our officers seriously and we take the public seriously. When those things come in at the same time it’s credible.”
Salt Lake City Police identified the “gunman” at Highland High School as the man who refills the vending machines and said students had mistaken his identity.
