The wailing of sirens and the blue lights flashing as police cars sped to Dalton High School. The calls of “Code Red! Code Red!” Teachers locking doors, turning off lights, telling students to be quiet and to hide behind desks. Parents frantically trying to get in touch with their children. Viral videos of students running through hallways to reach a safe place.

These were some of the many scenes Wednesday morning after a teacher brandished a handgun in his classroom at Dalton High, firing a single shot through an exterior window. The shot resulted in a school lockdown and having “everyone with a badge” converging on the school, Dalton Police Department spokesman Bruce Frazier said.

Dalton High social studies teacher Randal Davidson, 53, of 5219 Highway 11, Rising Fawn, was charged with aggravated assault, carrying a weapon on school grounds, terroristic threats, reckless conduct, possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime and disrupting a public school. He is being held in the Whitfield County jail without bond.

No one was seriously injured. Principal Steve Bartoo said one female student twisted her ankle in the evacuation.

Davidson is a fixture at the school and well-known in the community as the radio play-by-play voice of the Dalton Catamounts and the Dalton State College Roadrunners. He also wrote two books on the history of the school’s football program. He has been employed by the school system since 2004 and was selected as the school’s STAR Teacher in 2012 by a student. The STAR (Student Teacher Achievement Recognition) program honors a student from each school who selects a teacher who has made a difference in his or her live.

“Excellent teacher. Very good teacher. Well thought of in our school,” Bartoo said in describing Davidson. “He is a good teacher. I would be surprised if it were any of our teachers, not just him. Our teachers care about our kids, love our kids, take care of our kids. It would be shocking to any principal if one of their teachers pulled a gun out in a classroom and shot it.”

Bartoo spoke to the media during an afternoon press conference at the Dalton Convention Center where students and staff were taken after the shooting, and where parents filled the parking lot and the upper ballroom level while they waited anxiously to reunite with their children.

“I am absolutely so proud and thankful of our faculty, our students, our police department and police officers that responded to our school today,” Bartoo said. “I saw a lot of brave kids and a lot of brave teachers do a lot of brave acts. They did exactly what we train to do, so if anything out of all of this, that was good to see.”

Bartoo walked through the timeline of events. He said that at about 11:40 a.m. he received a call from an assistant principal to assist on the wing where Davidson taught. Classes were just beginning to change and Davidson was coming out of a planning period but wouldn’t let students into the classroom.

Bartoo said as he was approaching he saw the assistant principal guiding students into a classroom that was a few doors down from Davidson’s classroom.

“She told me he was telling people to go away and not to come in,” Bartoo said. “I went to the classroom and attempted to enter the classroom and he slammed the door — I didn’t get the door open very far — but he slammed the door and hollered, ‘Go away. Don’t come in here.’ He had some nonsensical noises that were made as well.”

Bartoo said he radioed for School Resource Officer Bart Chandler who is assigned to Dalton High, but Bartoo said Chandler was checking on something at Dalton Middle School. While Bartoo spoke with Chandler on the radio, students in the classrooms surrounding Davidson’s room were evacuated. Then, Bartoo went back to Davidson’s room.

“I put my key in the door and again he said, ‘Don’t come in here’ and ‘I have a gun,’” Bartoo said. “At that point, I put our school into a threat lockdown immediately, and it was shortly after that that I heard a gunshot.”

That was when students said they heard the call of “Code Red” in the school.

“We heard Code Red, and the way Principal Bartoo said it, you could tell he was scared,” said junior Wesley Caceres, who posted a Snapchat video of students sprinting through the halls.

As police began to arrive at the campus, Bartoo said Davidson was isolated in his room. When Chandler arrived, Davidson agreed to surrender, some 30 to 45 minutes after the threat lockdown had been initiated.

“Our School Resource Officer Bart Chandler was on scene there,” DPD Interim Chief Cliff Cason said. “He has a very close relationship with the staff at Dalton High School. He spoke to the teacher involved and was able to persuade him to come outside and surrender without causing harm to himself or making us cause harm to himself. I am very proud of this officer and everything he did.”

Frazier said in a press release that the gun was a .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver and that Davidson had brought the gun with him to school in a computer case.

Cason praised the levelheadedness of the school staff in helping to handle the situation.

“Our job would not have been near as easy to execute (Wednesday) if it wasn’t for how well they did with their lockdown drill,” Cason said. “When we got there, they directed us where they needed us to go and it made things so much easier for us because it wasn’t mass chaos like you see a lot of time. The kids did exactly what they were supposed to do. The educators did what they were supposed to do, and it let us do what we needed to do to have a successful completion of that.”

Personnel from the DPD, Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office, Georgia State Patrol, Dalton Fire Department, Whitfield County Fire Department, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, FBI, state Department of Public Safety and the Motor Carrier Compliance Division assisted, helping with everything from the investigation to crowd control and traffic management along Walnut Avenue up to the convention center.