Chicago-area police are undoubtedly feeling like a bunch of asses after an inadvertent cell phone “butt dial” sent more than 30 gun-toting SWAT team members storming into a middle school looking for a hostage situation.
An administrative employee at the Carleton Washburne School in Winnetka, Ill., was listening to music while driving home after work Monday evening when his cell phone accidentally dialed his wife from his back pocket.
The wife answered but didn’t hear her husband. What she did hear, though, was enough to send her into a panic.
“He was listening to music and he had, I don’t know, hip-hop … or music like that, where there were lyrics that were gangster-like,” school Superintendent Mark Friedman told the Chicago Tribune. “So there were lyrics on the radio as he was driving home, and she listened to it and became concerned.”
Winnetka Police Chief Joseph De Lopez told the paper that the man’s cell phone called his wife because her number was stored as the last number that was dialed, and that what she heard on the other end “led her to believe there was someone holding him hostage” in his office at the school.
After the terrified wife called 911, more than 30 SWAT team members and other police carrying automatic weapons swarmed the school grounds at around 5 p.m., according to local reports.
The 500 seventh- and eighth-graders who attend the school had already left for the day, but the incident caused alarm in the normally peaceful suburban neighborhood.
Full story: Accidental cell phone ‘butt dial’ sends SWAT team into middle school looking for hostage