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DALTON, Ga. — Wesley Caceres thought he was going to die.

The Dalton High School junior had been through drills before at the school, and experienced last week’s increased police presence after a threatening note was found.

But on Wednesday when the school was put on a threat lockdown with students huddled in classrooms and other hiding places after a teacher fired a bullet through a window, Caceres talked to his mother, thinking he was going to die.

“I was just like I was going to die today,” he said. “I really thought I was going to die. I thought it was a real shooting and we were all going to die. I had no imagination that it would be a teacher with a gun. I was on my way to business class and all we heard is ‘Code Red! Code Red! Lockdown!'”

Caceres and other students were shepherded into the nearest classroom. He said students have been taught to hide, and to seek cover behind desks and to keep quiet. But, he said, he took a call from his mother and whispered his way through the conversation.

“We were whispering and I told her I couldn’t talk, but she was asking me questions and finally I told her I would call her job when I was OK,” Caceres said. “I wasn’t really scared until I talked to my mom. I was in the corner of the room and wondering what … was going on. We have had threats about a shooter, and I was like, ‘Man, are you playing games again?’ I am just trying to get out of here and go home.”

Last Thursday, five or six extra police officers were on campus in addition to the school resource officer who is normally there after the discovery of the threatening note by some students. Against the backdrop of the school shooting in Florida earlier this month that took the lives of 17 people and a national debate over guns and school safety, that threat was taken very seriously.

Dalton Principal Steve Bartoo said at the time the “number one priority” of any school is always student safety.

On Wednesday, the police presence was back, but the lights and sirens were on this time and the threat was very real.

But the threat of a shooter was not that of a student or a social media prank or a student looking for attention. When the “Code Red” was called, the threat was real and it was from a teacher.

Social studies teacher Randal Davidson — a 14-year veteran of the school and a former STAR teacher — surrendered to police after having barricaded himself in his classroom and firing a shot through a window from a .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver. He faces multiple charges including aggravated assault, carrying a weapon on school grounds and terroristic threats.

“We thank God that nobody got hurt,” Bartoo said. One female student twisted her ankle in the evacuation.

Interim Superintendent Don Amonett said Dalton High School will be closed today and classes will resume on Friday. Amonett said four counselors at the school and a school social worker will be available for students and staff, as well as other response personnel who are planned for by system officials in the event of traumatic events.

Few of the students who were going about their day in other parts of the school knew much when the “Code Red” call came. But one student said he knew it was serious.

“We went under lockdown and I was sitting in the gym at the time,” freshman Corey Patterson said. “All of a sudden over the intercom you hear ‘Everyone needs to leave. You need to get somewhere and get safe.’ They locked us in the locker room and then they called for an evac (evacuation).”

Several students, school staff and police officials agreed Dalton High was well-prepared for such a situation. Even before the shooting in Parkland, Fla., on Valentine’s Day, school officials had run a “threat lockdown” drill, according to Bartoo. He said that after the initial shock of what was happening on Wednesday, students and staff responded exactly as they had been drilled to do.

“If there is a lockdown, they are instructed to get kids into a classroom and lock the door and turn out the light and out of the line of sight of windows,” Bartoo said. “You do what you are trained to do.”

For the students, that meant following the instructions of the teachers and trying to be calm, which freshman Devanshi Patel said wasn’t easy.

“Everyone ran,” Patel said when the evacuation call came. “I was scared. I didn’t know what was going on, but I didn’t think it was a drill. It was real and we knew it. But you never expect it to happen, especially with it being a teacher.”

While police isolated Davidson in his classroom, the decision was made to evacuate students. Plans called for the removal of the students to the Dalton Convention Center. Access to the campus was cut off and parents began to flood into the convention center shortly after the evacuation plan was decided upon. The task of moving roughly 1,800 students was begun. All students and staff were evacuated, leaving only law enforcement officials at the school after Davidson had been taken into custody.

While school staff and law enforcement personnel tried to make the reunions at the convention center as smooth as possible, it still was a time-consuming process of matching up each student with a parent. Parents were complimentary of the response.

“I thought it was pretty good and excellent and in order,” said Tina East, the parent of a freshman. “They tried to keep everyone calm and collected. I was kind of freaked out a little bit and then when you hear that it is a teacher and teachers are supposed to protect your children, it makes you worry and it is kind of scary to send your kids to school these days.”

Gov. Nathan Deal said the shooting was “disturbing.”

“Even though — thankfully — apparently no students were in danger, it’s always disturbing when anything like that happens within the context of a school,” Deal said late Wednesday afternoon.

State Rep. Kasey Carpenter, R-Dalton, a 1996 graduate of Dalton High, was more blunt.

“”It sucks to see your community have to go through that,” said an emotional Carpenter, who said he knew Davidson as the “voice of the Catamounts,” the radio play-by-play announcer for the school’s athletic teams.

Carpenter said he was concerned, though, that the incident would lead to “knee-jerk reactions” in the ongoing gun debate, which has lately turned to the possibility of arming teachers.

“It just continues to press the urgency of the issue,” Carpenter said. “And it’s never more important than when it’s your community.”

Jill Nolin, who covers the Georgia Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites, contributed to this story.