By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
Calvin Polachek wants to be thought of as a hero who survived a deadly school shooting in the small town of Dallas, Pennsylvania. He claims the shooting occurred eight years ago and killed 11 of his classmates, including both his brother and his best friend.
But Polachek’s former classmates have a different story.
“There was never a school shooting,” Dallas High School alum Sarah Cominsky told local reporters. Four additional classmates said the same thing: The Dallas, Pennsylvania school district has never had a mass shooting. The students even said that Polachek’s brother is still alive and is doing well.
School district officials and the Dallas Police Department were shocked by Polachek’s comments, which immediately rebounded among media and other websites.
“It’s my 26th year in Dallas and I could tell you that thankfully we’ve never had an event like that in our school district,” Dallas School Superintendent, Thomas Duffy, told the local ABC affiliate. “It’s very troubling and disheartening that it was a story that was being promulgated.”
“There has never been a school shooting at Dallas High School,” Dallas Police Chief Doug Higgins posted on his department’s Facebook page. “Not in 2017, and not at any point in our community’s history. These false claims are deeply troubling.”
Polachek first concocted his story three months ago in Kentucky at an anti-gun rally sponsored by the Kentucky chapters of Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action, according to Dallas Police.
“At the rally, Mr. Polachek claimed that in 2017 he survived a school shooting at Dallas High School in Dallas, Pennsylvania, an incident in which he said he lost his best friend, his brother, and nine others. These claims are entirely false. Nonetheless, they were reported by multiple Kentucky media outlets, including Fox 56 in Lexington and the Kentucky Lantern, and have since spread nationally across platforms such as MSN, Yahoo News, various online publications, and social media,” the Dallas Police said in a press release. “The widespread sharing of a fabricated tragedy is not only reckless, it is harmful. It fuels unnecessary fear, disrespects the experiences of real victims of school violence, and misleads the public with a narrative that has no basis in truth.”
The police found Polachek’s lies erode public trust.
“Let us be absolutely clear: this even never occurred. There has never been a school shooting at Dallas High School. Not in 2017, and not at any point in our community’s history,” the department said.
Polachek has disappeared since his lies became known. He did not return multiple media calls seeking his comments. The Second Amendment Foundation was also unable to contact him for this story.
Polachek’s history
Polachek was the “Bentley the Falcon” mascot for three years while attending Bentley College. According to a 2023 story in his former college newspaper, Polachek shared “one of the top skills of being a good mascot.”
“You need to know how to read a room. That’s super important when you’re losing a game, for example, and need to figure out how to make a better and more positive environment for the fans,” he said.
He wanted to become the mascot for a professional team.
“I’m excited and eager to begin a role in a professional sports organization that takes great pride in their mascot and consistently enriches the community around them,” Polachek told the college paper.
According to his LinkedIn page, Polachek wrote that he is “Skilled in trend analysis, risk assessment & uncovering value where others overlook it.”
He is “open to work,” as either a compliance or financial analyst, either onsite or “hybrid,” and would take a job in U.S., North America or the European Union. He claims he can start, “Immediately, I am actively applying.”
Anti-gunners respond
Once word got out about Polachek’s lies, the response from the anti-gunners who invited him to speak was swift.
“Polachek is not an active volunteer with Moms Demand Action or Students Demand Action, and we are deeply disappointed that someone would exploit the tragic, lived experience of many to use our platform to share a story that was not true,” Sarah Boland Heine, the senior director of communications for Everytown, said in a Wednesday statement.
“Calvin reached out to our Kentucky chapter, shamefully lied to our volunteers and shared a tragic story that we later learned was not true,” Heine said in an interview. “This is an affront to the countless survivors of gun violence who show extraordinary courage every day by reliving their darkest moments in service of the fight to end our country’s gun violence crisis. We are revisiting our guidance to our grassroots networks in an effort to ensure this never happens again.”
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