False Threat Led to Naval Academy Lockdown and Then a Mistaken Shooting

A post on an anonymous chat platform triggered a lockdown at the U.S. Naval Academy this week, and authorities investigating what turned out to be a false report of a gunman then shot and injured a midshipman who had mistaken them as a threat, a military official said Friday.

The base that hosts the academy went into lockdown around 5 p.m. Thursday after it received a threat. However, the official said the threat wasn’t real — it came from a computer belonging to a former midshipman who was later confirmed to be in another part of the country. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to speak freely about an ongoing investigation.

The false report comes amid anxiety over a spate of recent violence at schools nationwide, including the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah college. A shooting at a high school in Denver this week left two students injured and the gunman dead, while a shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic school left two children dead and 17 injured just over two weeks ago.

During the lockdown at the Naval Academy on Thursday, the Navy said in a statement at the time that it was responding to “reports of threats” but that the lockdown was “out of an abundance of caution.”