Sarah Jones was 11 hours and 49 minutes into her 12-hour shift as an emergency dispatcher for the county sheriff in Spokane, Washington, when she received what she would later describe as the worst phone call of her life.
It was a Wednesday morning in May 2023, around 10 o’clock, when the call—from someone who identified himself only as “Wayne”—came in via a publicly listed regional emergency line. “I’m going to walk into Central Valley High School in Veradale with my AK-47,” Wayne told the operator who first picked up. The voice was unnaturally deep, slow, so claustrophobically close to the microphone that its breath seemed to fill the line. “I’m going to kill everyone I see.”
That operator transferred him to Jones (WIRED has changed her name at her request), a 42-year-old, red-headed mother of three. Jones’ office at the Spokane Regional Emergency Center was chronically understaffed, so she’d been working overtime through that night and morning, drinking Dunkin’ Donuts–branded coffee from the office’s Keurig machine amid the usual marathon of domestic violence and reckless driving reports. Jones had spent years taking 911 calls; only that week she’d been promoted to “law dispatch,” a position that included dealing with callers carrying out crimes in progress—“hot calls,” as dispatchers referred to them. This would be her first.
Sarah Jones, the dispatcher at the Spokane Regional Emergency Center, who received the swatting call that targeted Central Valley High School.
Andrea Lombard, Sarah Jones' supervisor at the time of the call.
When Jones read the message from the operator that accompanied Wayne’s transfer, she realized with a rush of adrenaline that she was speaking to an active school shooter, and that she had seconds to persuade this stranger not to carry out his plan.
“Hi. Wayne? What’s going on?” Jones asked calmly, taming her racing heartbeat.
“It’s too complicated,” the voice drawled, so grotesque that Jones initially thought the sound might be recorded from a horror movie. “All you need to know is that I want cops here as soon as possible. Because after I kill everyone I see, I want to kill cops too.”
ANIMATION: TRACY LEE
