Gun safety group says UofL student lied about surviving high school shooting
Calvin Polachek, center, in jacket and tie, said he survived a mass shooting at his Pennsylvania high school during a gun safety rally in February at the Kentucky Capitol. The shooting never happened, according to organizers, the local school system and police. (Sarah Ladd/ Kentucky Lantern)
Everytown for Gun Safety says a man who spoke at a February rally for gun safety it helped organize in Frankfort lied about his experience surviving a school shooting.
The event, which the Lantern and other media outlets covered, happened Feb. 12 in the Kentucky State Capitol. Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action hosted a variety of speakers who advocated against gun violence.
One of the speakers, Calvin Polachek, said that when he was a high school student in Pennsylvania, he lost people in a school shooting, including claiming that he saw his best friend lying in a pool of blood.
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. The Lantern reached out to Moms Demand Action, which is part of the Everytown gun safety group network, after receiving numerous messages from people who said they were classmates or relatives of Polachek and that the shooting never happened
'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. '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.'
Polachek did not immediately respond to Facebook and LinkedIn messages from the Lantern. Polachek was identified as a University of Louisville student at the rally. A UofL spokesperson said Wednesday that he is currently a graduate student.
The Dallas School District, in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, said in a Wednesday statement that it 'is aware of a video clip and accompanying article that appears to depict a former Dallas student speaking about a school shooting at Dallas in 2017.'
'Thankfully, that never happened,' the school said. 'The discussion on the clip about Dallas and school violence is not factually accurate.'
The school district did not immediately return a voicemail from the Lantern.
Meanwhile, the Dallas Township Police Department said the claims made that day at the rally are 'entirely false.'
'The widespread sharing of a fabricated tragedy is not only reckless, it is harmful,' the police department said in a news release. '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.'
This story may be updated.
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