By Scott Leamon
WSLS10 Reporter
Published: March 26, 2008

Listen to call 1
Listen to call 2
Listen to call 3
Listen to call 4
Listen to call 5

Rockbridge County sheriff Bob Day said it sounded like his worst nightmare, only he was wide awake.

“I’ve listened to it four times now and each time you listen it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up,” Day said Wednesday morning from the sheriff’s office.

What Day listened to was a set of hoax emergency calls from four suspects claiming officers were being shot at and at least two had been wounded.

“Any time we’re going to go and run flat out is when another officer calls for help or assistance,” Day said.

Five Rockbridge County deputies, four state police troopers and at least one officer from a nearby town rushed to the scene in a pouring rain storm only to later find out all the calls were phony.

It all started around 9:15 PM on March 15th when Lexington volunteer firefighter Bill Ramsey laid down his emergency radio at his job as a convenience store clerk.

“About 20 minutes later I noticed it wasn’t on my side and got to looking for it,” Ramsey said.

Ramsey thought it had “disappeared.”

Investigators believe it was something else.

The phony emergency calls started coming in around an hour after Ramsey’s radio went missing.

Among the first heard by dispatchers at Rockbridge County’s central command in Buena Vista was a report of shots being fired at 1502 Stoner Hollow Road.

Dispatchers knew it was a police channel, but little else.

As dispatchers scrambled to figure out which officers were under fire, police from miles around started responding to Stoner Hollow Road.

Other phony emergency calls would follow.

“Shots fired!  Shots fired!  Shots fired!”

“Two men down!  We still need back up.  Stoner Hollow.  Stoner Hollow...”

Ironically Ramsey and fellow volunteer rescuers were on stand by near the scene to help the supposedly “injured” officers.

It was around that time Ramsey called central dispatch to tell them his radio was missing.  He said a dispatcher immediately transferred his call to the sheriff’s office.

“Then we got this call that said it was a prank call,” Ramsey said.

Deputies at the scene said it took them about twenty minutes to figure out 1502 Stoner Hollow Road did not exist.

One responding deputy said he was surprised he didn’t crash responding to the scene so quickly on rain slick roads.

Day said deputies recovered the radio and interviewed four suspects investigators believe were involved in the hoax.

Day expects those four to be charged in the near future.

You can listen to audio clips of the hoax at the top of this article.