UPDATE: URI President: No Gun Detected, Investigation Continuing
Thursday, April 04, 2013
URI president David Dooley has spoken to the press about the emergency event on campus this morning involving a possible active shooter. Alarm in the wake of a student standing up in a class in Chafee Hall taught by Professor Barbara Van Skiver created concern that the student had a gun.
No gun has been reported to have been seen. None has been found.
President Dooley spoke about the rapidity with which the word of URI's emergency spread via text alerts. "We have a very active alert system that utilizes all outlets: our text alerts, Facebook, and Twitter," he said. "As soon as there's an emergency we post that alert on all these outlets, so that everyone gets the message as soon as possible. We were pleased by the rapidity by which students heard that we had an emergency."
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTPresident Dooley said that the immediate and massive response to the alert text that provided a link to the university's home page crashed the school's website. "Facebook continued to work throughout the incident," he said. "But the website went down. It was geting someting like a million hits a minute. i think that with the traffic that was generated by the initial annoucnement, and the way it profilterated, it shouldn't surprise us."
Dooley also addressed questions regarding Humans versus Zombies, a group on campus that was running a hunting-oriented game today. A Nerf gun was found in the classroom after it cleared, but there is currently no link between that Nerf gun, the group's activities, and the emergency itself.
"We've had the group on campus, they're a recognized group. We've never had any problem in the past, but we'll have to look at it. In the current climate, where these kinds of incidents become everyone's worse nightmare you have to think again."
The state police confirmed that it responded with 25 troopers with 3 or 4 canines on the scene.
"Thank god it was nothing more serious than it appears to have been," Dooley said, discussing arming campus security in the event of an emergency such as this one. "It reinforces that whether we should have a force that is fully capable of responding in the shortest possible time. I'm on the record supporting that. This will cause us to look at this with even more intensity."
