BLAME THE BLACK GUY: A White Security Guard Shot Himself and Blamed a Made-Up Black Guy

according TO VICE.COM A White Security Guard Shot Himself and Blamed a Made-Up Black Guy

The campus security guard admitted Wednesday that he accidentally shot himself in the shoulder and made up the whole story so he wouldn't get in trouble.

A white security guard who told police he'd been shot by a black man on Tuesday has admitted that the wound was self-inflicted and that he made the whole thing up, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.

According to police, St. Catherine University campus security officer Brent Ahlers admitted he'd accidentally shot himself in the shoulder Tuesday night after bringing his own handgun to work, which was against school policy. Ahlers began to worry he might be fired when the Catholic school found out, so, rather than come clean about improperly handling his own firearm while working at a college campus, he decided to pin the blame on someone else: a black man with a "short afro" who had shot him and fled.

Ahlers's alleged assault sent the Minneapolis-St. Paul university into a massive lockdown Tuesday night and prompted a four-hour sweep across the 110-acre campus by police, helicopters, and K-9 units, the Star Tribune reports. Around "1,800 students [were] held captive in their dorm rooms" during the search, St. Paul police spokesman Mike Ernster told the press Wednesday.

Ahlers was taken to the hospital and treated for the non-life-threatening wound. After the exhaustive search failed to find the phony suspect and a long night likely spent thinking about his bullshit story, Ahlers admitted the truth to police. He was arrested for falsely reporting a crime and—just as he initially was afraid of—has subsequently been fired by St. Catherine University.

The phony shooting comes less than a month after a Colorado man told police that he was stabbed by an assailant for looking like a "neo-Nazi," only to later admit that he had fabricated the whole thing and actually just stabbed himself.

"[Ahlers] put not only black youth at risk, he put St. Paul police and other law enforcement at risk with his lie," St. Paul NAACP president Dianne Binns told theStar Tribune. "That's what black people live with... We've been lynched, and we've been put in jail to find out later you haven't done it. That's the sad thing about it. It hasn't stopped."