Austin Police Department lifted an austin shelter in place order about 10 minutes after sending it to 51,789 people in South Austin on Wednesday. The alert had covered a one-mile radius near Willow Springs Road and Industrial Boulevard while police searched for a suspect near St. Elmo.
The message reached residents while a dangerous and violent person with outstanding warrants was at large. APD later said the subject had fled the area after an extensive search.
Chris Bataska on Barton Springs Road
Chris Bataska received the alert at his office on Barton Springs Road and said his first reaction was to treat it like a phishing attempt. “We’ve had a lot of phishing attempts at the company so my first thought was to email it to IT because it looked like a different link than normal,” he said.
The alert was written in all caps, and some recipients got a link that said, “please click here to acknowledge receipt of this message.” Bataska said, “It just created some skepticism.”
John Stolz and the alert text
John Stolz described the message as “slightly confused and a little caught off guard” and said, “It seemed really spammy,” after receiving it in South Austin. Those reactions matched the format of the alert itself, which was broad enough to reach more than 50,000 people and unusual enough to look like a scam to some readers before police said it was real.
APD said on X about 30 minutes after the alert was sent that it was real. The agency described the suspect as a muscular Black man in his mid-30s wearing a white shirt and a white hat with a red brim, and told the public to stay inside, lock doors and call 911 if they saw him.
APD and federal agencies
APD said it had minor involvement in the incident and was assisting the Texas Department of Public Safety and the FBI. After the shelter-in-place was lifted, the FBI said the suspect was in custody.
For South Austin residents who got the alert, the practical shift was immediate: the order ended quickly, but the early minutes required people to treat the message as real until police said otherwise. The alert moved fast, and so did the confusion around it.
