Randal Davidson

DALTON, Ga. — Before Dalton High School teacher Randal Davidson fired a gun in his otherwise empty classroom earlier this year, he had two previous encounters with police that school officials knew about. But they are not saying what they did with that knowledge.

A Dalton Police Department spokesman said the department made school officials aware when, in March 2016, Davidson came to police headquarters saying he “wanted to confess to having someone killed,” and told an officer and a detective about being part of a plot against a woman with whom he had had an “internet affair.”

Police found that none of the information could be confirmed and the woman did not even seem to exist.

“It appears the subject may be delusional or have something else that had occurred that is causing him to have these thoughts,” a police incident report said.

Davidson was taken to Hamilton Medical Center. Police said they would follow up and contact his son.

In January 2017, the school resource officer at Dalton High School was told a staff member “might be missing,” according to another incident report. About two hours later, school staff said Davidson had been found on School Street near the intersection with April Street. When the officer arrived, he saw Davidson sitting on a curb being held up by two school staff members.

“Davidson was conscious and did not appear to be in any type of physical distress,” the officer wrote in the report. “I attempted to speak with Davidson as did staff members but no amount of stimulus would draw a response from Davidson.”

Davidson was again taken to Hamilton Medical Center.

Despite these incidents, Davidson returned to teaching, and on Feb. 28 of this year — two weeks after the shootings at a high school in Florida resulted in 17 deaths — Davidson fired a pistol through a window in his classroom, causing the school to be put on lockdown and evacuated. One student injured an ankle during the evacuation, and Dalton High School Principal Steve Bartoo said there was a real fear among students and staff that there was an active shooter on campus.

Davidson’s attorney would later say Davidson had come to school that day contemplating suicide in a place he felt loved.

Davidson pleaded guilty in July to first-degree criminal damage to property and carrying a weapon within a school safety zone, both felonies, and to disrupting the operation of a public school, a misdemeanor. He was sentenced to two years in prison and eight years on probation as part of a plea deal.

Asked if Davidson was on leave at the time of the March 2016 incident — the incident report said Davidson told investigators he had just gotten out of the hospital that day — or what steps, if any, school officials took to assess Davidson’s mental health before he returned to the classroom after the incidents in 2016 and 2017, Dalton Public Schools Chief of Staff Pat Holloway provided the following statement:

“As the school district has indicated on several occasions, privacy rights of employees, including, but not limited to, those set forth in O.C.G.A. §§20-2-210 and 50-18-72(a)(1) and (2) (Georgia law), prohibit us from sharing information that might relate to leave as to any specific employee. I can tell you that the district complies with the requirements of the Family Medical Leave Act and when an employee is out under leave pursuant to that federal statute, the employee must obtain a certification from an appropriate medical professional before the employee is allowed to return to work.”

Asked if they had reviewed how the school system handled those previous incidents, Board of Education Chairman Rick Fromm and Vice Chairman Matt Evans were similarly tight-lipped.

“School security and student safety are some of the top priorities of the Board of Education,” the two said in a joint statement. “As a board, it is our practice not to discuss personnel issues publicly. We believe these types of issues are best addressed by the superintendent and his staff. … Having discussed and reviewed recent events and the related personnel matter, we believe our administration acted appropriately and within the confines of relevant law. We have confidence that our superintendent and administrators are working to provide the students and staff of Dalton Public Schools a safe and secure environment to learn.”

Board members Palmer Griffin, Tulley Johnson and Pablo Perez did not return telephone messages.

Dalton Assistant Police Chief Chris Crossen said that when Davidson and his wife walked into the Police Services Center in March 2016 so that Davidson could “confess to having someone killed,” detectives took the claim very seriously.

“There was an initial interview,” said Crossen. “From there, you just start taking each segment of what he said and determine which parts are factual.”

Crossen said Davidson gave them some specific information.

“He gave us a specific name for the woman, so the first thing we did was start looking for a woman with that specific name,” Crossen said. “We looked in the databases we have. We looked online. He’d also mentioned a young man who was a former student who knew her. But we weren’t able to find her.”

But even after running into a dead end, detectives continued to work the case.

“We still kept looking at different aspects of the story trying to check them out,” Crossen said. “We tried to see if maybe this woman had a different identity from the one he gave us, to see if they were OK. We looked at the different communities he mentioned to see if they had any missing persons. We looked at every lead we had, and if those led to more leads, we looked at those. We were in communication with the district attorney’s office to make sure we didn’t miss anything. After all that, we concluded that none of his initial story was true.”

Police did not charge Davidson with filing a false report.

“If you come in and file a false report to get someone else in trouble or trying to get themselves out of trouble, that certainly falls under false statements and false reports,” Crossen said. “But if you come in and confess to something, well, I guess you could take some actions, but we didn’t because we understood this is a person having some delusions.”

Crossen said the department made school officials aware of Davidson’s claims quickly.

“The school resource officer was aware of what going on. I spoke with someone in the administration to let them know the gist of what is in that report,” he said. “He (Davidson) was not at the school at the time. I’m not 100 percent sure, but I believe he was on a leave of absence at that time.”

The police report said Davidson told investigators he had just gotten out of the hospital that day. After the interview, he was taken to Hamilton Medical Center because he was thinking about hurting himself, according to the report.

Crossen said police don’t have many options if someone is suffering a mental illness and hasn’t committed a crime.

“If we feel like someone is a threat to himself or to others, we call EMS to the scene for an evaluation. They talk to doctors. There have probably been instances where we have taken somebody directly to the hospital,” he said.

But unless that person seems to be an immediate threat to himself or others, Crossen said police don’t have many options.

Some Dalton residents say they wonder if more could have been done to prevent the shooting of the pistol in the classroom by Davidson.

“It just seems like if someone had put the pieces together, this wouldn’t have happened,” said Joe Lawson.