Campus shooting raises questions
In the most recent campus shooting, at Hampton University in Virginia on early Sunday morning, a former student shot a pizza delivery driver and a dorm monitor before shooting himself.
Some question how well the school handled the incident.
The dorm director sounded the building’s fire alarm after confronting and being shot by the gunman. Did that ensure a safe evacuation, some say, or expose students who thought they were fleeing from a fire into the gunman’s path? That’s debatable, but the monitor at least deserves some praise for doing what he could while he was himself wounded.
Less defensible is the school’s failure to send out a campuswide alert until nearly two hours later.
Wrote Michael Paul Williams in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
“University spokeswoman Yuri Rodgers Milligan said Hampton officials sent e-mails and text messages to students at 2:50 a.m. Faculty and staff were notified 10 minutes later.
“HU’s police chief delayed the alert ‘because there was no immediate threat to students, or to the campus community . . . and the scene had been secured,’ Milligan said.
“But could police have been absolutely sure? One of the lessons we should have learned from Virginia Tech was to assume nothing.
“On April 16, 2007, Tech police initially thought they were dealing with a double-homicide after two students were found dead in a dorm.
‘They did not take sufficient action to deal with what might happen if the initial lead proved erroneous,’ stated a report by the panel that investigated the Tech massacre.
" ‘The police reported to the university emergency policy group that the “person of interest” probably was no longer on campus.”
“The panel’s report also noted that senior Tech administrators failed to issue an all-campus notification until almost two hours after the initial shootings.”
For the entire commentary, click here.
The incident points out the pressing need for all schools to have a well-conceived and well-communicated plan on how to deal with such emergencies.
Kudos especially to UNCG, for staging a full-fledged drill in 2008 with local law enforcement on a mock shooting.
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