HONESDALE BOROUGH, PA — A law enforcement response that shut down portions of Honesdale on Friday, June 12 was prompted by an officer’s report of something he thought to be a ricochet, according to police chief Don Thacher. 

Thacher explained the situation to the Honesdale Borough Council at a Monday, June 22 meeting, at the prompting of borough councilor James Hamill. 

“What happened was one of the officers heard what sounded like a ricochet, or a sound that sounded like a bullet went by, like a ‘zing’ sound,” said Thacher. “He didn’t know what it was, and he explained to the comms center, ‘I think somebody shot, but I’m not sure.’ And what happened was it just called everybody out.”

“He didn’t hear a shot go off, but he heard something that sounded like a ricochet, and actually, he had his windows open, and he said he actually felt something go by the front of his face,” said Thacher. 

Law enforcement cordoned off the area looking for a potential shooter, but found nothing, said Thacher. “We don’t know if it could have been a pellet gun… or something like that, but of course, at the end, they didn’t find anything.”

Hamill said that, while he was glad the worst case scenario had not happened, the scale of the response and inadequate messaging from officials had led the public to assume the worst.

“I think the public has every right to want to understand as soon as possible what’s going on, even if it is conveying that there’s a matter under investigation and that, as soon as a determination can be made as to whether or not the public is in any danger, they’ll be notified through the proper channels,” said Hamill. 

Communication

Much of the official communication on the day came from Honesdale Mayor Derek Williams. 

Shortly after noon on Friday, June 12, Williams posted an update to his mayoral Facebook page. It read, in part, “The extra police presence people noticed was due to a reported shooting. That activity has not been confirmed, nobody has been hurt and there is no active threat in our community.”

Williams followed up with a longer post on Sunday, June 14, talking about the official response to and communication around the issue. 

“When a potential threat is being assessed, people nearest to it might receive a notification from the responders themselves,” Williams wrote. “That’s what happened here. Wider, public notifications are not always gonna be part of the deal in the early moments. We don’t want to cause undue panic.”

Williams wrote that, in the moment, he had talked to law enforcement at the scene, who had given him the information that there was no threat. “I shared that message as accurately and as soon as I could,” Williams wrote. “Was that satisfactory to many of those who had been scared and wondering what was going on that morning? No. Was I doing the best I could with the hand I had been dealt that morning? I believed so.”

Williams wrote that, while he knew official government responses would likely always lag behind the rumor mill, he wasn’t “super satisfied” with how the conversation had played out around the Riverside Drive response. “At the borough, to my knowledge, we don’t have a procedure for messaging around ambiguous situations like this… we have learned where we are lacking and are already planning to discuss this topic next week so we can have clear plans and procedures for a wide array of emergency messaging going forward.”

During the June 22 meeting, Hamill encouraged increased prioritization on public safety.

“It really does show that a good term and six months into the job that we have not prioritized the things that we were sent to office to do,” said Hamill. Hamill and Williams first won election to their respective roles in 2021. Hamill challenged Williams in the 2025 mayoral race, with improved police oversight as a key tenet of his campaign, and lost, earning 348 votes to Williams’ 822. 

Hamill questioned the means through which the borough communicates with the public and encouraged the borough to take concrete steps to improve them.

“It would be helpful in the future to have the law enforcement agency doing the messaging and then the mayor sharing,” said Hamill. “Because the mayor can be pretty verbose—and I’m not condemning that, I think it’s healthy to have a very broad discussion or sharing of information—but sometimes we need to have a little more succinct communication to the public.”