No threat found after Dallas County HHS building evacuated due to false alarm

DALLAS - A reported shooting forced the evacuation of the Dallas County Health and Human Services Building late Thursday afternoon.

No threat was found, but it was a tense situation just three months after a deadly shooting at the medical examiner's office.

The call was originally reported at 2:54 p.m. as an active shooter on foot.

The Dallas County Sheriff's Office said an employee in the building said she thought she heard about 5 gunshots. The woman's family then called Dallas police.

Dallas police was the first on the scene. The sheriff’s office arrived moments later.

Law enforcement evacuated the building and did a sweep but found no evidence of a shooting. 

"We have checked the building. We looked around the building and looking at the facility. We do not see anything showing rounds into the building," said Dallas County Sheriff Marion Brown.

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said the medical examiner’s building next door was also evacuated. He said employees are still shaken up from the Nov. 8 shooting death of an employee there killed by an estranged husband who then shot himself.

Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office shooting victim identified

"It was three months ago that we lost one of our own. We don’t have any injuries today that we know of. They did a really good job evacuating," Jenkins said. "Whether it’s a false alarm or not, it's very disturbing to the employees having lost a coworker in this building on Nov. 8. 

The woman who told her relative about what she thought she heard won’t be charged. She also said she believed the sound "could have been construction."

Sheriff Brown said she encourages the public to still call the police if they think they hear gunshots.

"Because the individual wasn't sure, we are glad she would rather err on the side of caution and call us out and make sure," she said. "There could have been a situation where there were persons in there working with no knowledge of something threatening them."

SKY 4 spotted people leaving the building as it was being evacuated.

Authorities are doing a second sweep of the building in an attempt to make sure they did not miss anything.

"We are comfortable that if they say they are going to pull out that our secondary search will not yield any threat," said Dallas County Sheriff Marion Brown. "We have to do it the same way every time because you never know."

The HHS building will be closed on Friday.