‘We don’t know how many shooters.’ 911 calls capture chaos, uncertainty of UNCC shooting
On Friday morning, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police released about an hour and 45 minutes’ worth of 911 calls about Tuesday’s UNC Charlotte classroom shooting, which killed two students and injured four more.
Police released 48 calls, including some from people who said they were in the classroom when the shooting began. Some callers sounded emotional, while some kept their voices calm as they provided as much information as possible.
At least two people were able to describe the shooter’s appearance and said he had a pistol.
“He was still shooting when we were leaving,” one caller said.
That same caller said the shooter had long black hair, a black outfit and glasses.
No one was able to name the gunman.
CMPD does not release the names of 911 callers.
Another call fits the narrative shared in lecturer Adam Johnson’s blog post from Thursday. Johnson said he and a group of students escaped to the anthropology department office in a nearby building, where the department chair called 911.
“We heard five shots, we don’t know how many shooters,” someone said during the call.
The dispatcher asked if students were still in the building. “We’re not sure,” he said. “A lot of students got out.”
One caller, who said he was getting information from his daughter, said firefighters were assisting a shooting victim in a men’s bathroom near an on-campus Chick-fil-A. He said his daughter was also hiding in a bathroom and believed the victim was shot in the hip area.
Other callers include people who were in other buildings and frantically trying to avoid the shooter. Some were huddled in bathrooms, while others said they had used desks and couches as makeshift barricades.
“We need everything,” one woman said in response to a 911 dispatcher asking at the start of the call: “Police, fire or medic?”
She seemed to be keeping her voice down to protect the group. They had barricaded themselves inside, she said.
“We don’t know what building he’s in,” she said. “We’re just hiding in the library.”
Off the phone, her voice breaking, the woman told students to stay as low to the ground as they could.
One person who may have been in the Kennedy Hall classroom — he was able to describe the shooter’s shirt and hair — told the 911 dispatcher the shooter might have moved on to the library.
Another caller said he had been sitting in the library trying to print something when someone ran in yelling, “Shooter!” Several callers seemed to believe the shooter was in the library.
Like other callers, one man said he had heard reports of a shooter and saw students running around. The dispatcher asked him if he was OK in his building.
“We’ve got 150 students in here,” he said. “We’ve got them in a corner.”
Dispatchers advised callers to stay low and quiet, to avoid opening doors for anyone but police and to call 911 again if their situations changed. Later on, some callers asked how they could trust that it was safe to come out when police arrived.
“We’re hiding out in Macy, we just wanted to make sure that, like, they’re checking every room,” one caller said. “We just wanted to make sure that they’ll say it’s police before they open the door or anything.”
At least 15 of the 48 calls came from people whose friend or family member was hiding from the shooter and couldn’t make noise with a phone call. The dispatchers said they were recording the location of everyone reported to be hiding, so that police could come and let them out.
Family members were told they could go to a Harris Teeter near campus to reunite with people who’d survived the shooting.
This story was originally published May 3, 2019 at 11:19 AM.
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