Campus securityVirginia Tech lockdown ends, no gunman found
In an attempt to avoid a repeat of the 2007 mass shooting which left thirty-two people dead, officials at Virginia Tech locked down its campus yesterday after receiving a report of a suspicious man who may have been armed; after an exhaustive search by local police that did not yield any results, authorities decided to lift the lockdown
VTU during lockdown // Source: france24.com
In an attempt to avoid a repeat of the 2007 mass shooting which left thirty-two people dead, officials at Virginia Tech locked down its campus yesterday after receiving a report of a suspicious man who may have been armed.
After an exhaustive search by local police that did not yield any results, authorities decided to lift the lockdown.
“The campus alert is lifted. There will continue to be a large police presence on campus today,” the university said in a notice posted on its website. “Police have not received nor discovered additional information about a person possibly carrying a weapon beyond that reported this morning.”
The campus issued an emergency lock down at 9:37 AM after it received a report from three teenage girls who said they had seen a man walking hurriedly on campus carrying what they believed to be a gun covered with a cloth. The girls were each about fourteen years old and were attending a summer camp on campus.
Campus officials instructed students and employees to stay inside and secure their doors. In addition all classes were canceled for the remainder of the day “out of an abundance of caution,” explained Larry Hincker, the associate vice president for university relations, at a news conference.
Police did not find any traces of the suspect and Wendell Flinchum, the Virginia Tech police chief, said that based on an interview with the three youths, their report was credible.
“They gave us a good description. We felt it was best course of action to issue a campus alert,” Flinchum said. “I think the girls believed what they reported. The officers believed they (the girls) believed what was reported and that’s the information they went with.”
Virginia Tech is currently not in session, but several thousand students are still on the campus attending summer classes or educational camps.
After the 2007 shooting, the school was heavily criticized and fined by federal authorities for not reacting quickly enough to address the dangerous situation. Learning from the past, school officials promptly sent out an initial warning on its web site and then alerted students and faculty. Throughout the day, officials updated its website to keep residents and authorities abreast of the situation.
In the 2007 incident campus officials waited nearly two hours after two students were shot to death before sending out an email alerting the campus about the incident. By the time the email went out, the shooter had chained shut the doors of a classroom building where he eventually killed thirty-two people before turning the gun on himself.
