Gun incident rattles students and disrupts a normal Saturday morning

This ominous warning blanketed campus early Saturday morning via text messages, e-mails and voicemails following reports of a student-aged male carrying a weapon near Spelman Halls.

From Spelman to movie theaters to dance floors to residential college computer clusters, the alert sent by the Princeton Telephone and E-mail Notification System (PTENS) touched off widespread fears of an armed gunman on campus.

“I honestly was really scared,” said Alex Kim ’12, who was at the Wilson College BlackBox when she received the alert. Kim added that she was “afraid for my roommate, who didn’t have access to a cell phone.”

Kim also said she found the 80-minute gap between the first report to Public Safety and the emergency alerts “pretty disconcerting.”

“That time could make such a big difference, and there were people outside at the time,” she said. “That’s actually kind of scary.”

Thomas Lee ’12 was also in Wilcox Hall when the alerts went out.

“The BlackBox staff put everyone in the BlackBox dance room and closed the doors,” Lee said, adding that everyone around him was text messaging as the staff closed the doors and asked everyone to stay in the room.

Lee noted that the staff had a computer in the room and periodically checked the University homepage for updates.

At Frist Campus Center, many of the students watching the University Film Organization-sponsored showing of “Milk” received an alert in the middle of the movie.

“One of the people who was collecting the tickets just came in and repeated what Public Safety had said [in the texts and voicemails],” Jay Qi ’12 said.

“We were kind of worried that there was something happening, but I didn’t fear that much for my safety,” Qi said, adding that he probably would have felt safer if he had been in his own room instead of in a public place.

Qi also expressed concern about the amount of time between students seeing the individual and Public Safety officials sending out an alert. “The alert system works well,” Qi said. “But I’m not sure about the timing.”

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In Spelman, where the individual carrying a weapon had been seen, resident Julia Neufeld ’10 first heard about the situation when her roommate received an alert via text message.

“I saw pretty much no commotion,” Neufeld said, adding that though she lives in Spelman, the incident seemed “pretty unexciting from [her] point of view.”

Neufeld said she wasn’t overly troubled about the situation until she and her roommates began to get calls from their friends checking to make sure that they had received the notices.

“They were just looking out for us,” Neufeld explained, calling the University’s alert system “the most efficient way that could be used to alert about potential hazards.”

Spelman resident Ting Lin ’10 said instant communication was an important tool in circulating information and enabling friends to check in on one another.

“Everyone was calling each other, texting each other, making sure everyone was OK and in a safe place,” Lin said.

Lin praised the University’s system as “extensive,” but said it worried her that the notification system was not triggered until roughly 80 minutes after the first reports were filed with Public Safety.

“In an 80-minute gap, a lot could happen,” Lin said.

Katie Hsih ’10, another Spelman resident, was asleep when the alert went out.

“Definitely right when I woke up, I heard from a number of people,” Hsih said in an e-mail. Though she “did not feel she was in too much danger,” Hsih said, “I was definitely on the cautious side, and we made sure our doors were locked.”

Hsih said she received updates through the Triangle Club e-mail list from students who claimed to have seen an individual with a weapon.

Tyrell Hall ’12 said he was in his Holder Hall dorm room when he received the alert telling him to stay inside. He then “decided to go take a nice, hot shower.”

“When I went to the shower, I was surprisingly very paranoid,” he said. “Some guy walked in, I saw the door open, so I had my brush ready for the attack, and I saw that it was just another civilian such as myself.”

Other students were not as concerned, though.

Caroline Rawls ’12 said she was “hanging out with [her] roommates” when they received the text messages and phone calls.

“The automated voice [in the alert message] wasn’t working properly, so we really didn’t understand what was going on,” Rawls said. “We felt pretty safe since the location of the incident wasn’t near us, but I definitely wasn’t going to walk around outside by myself until I heard that everything was all clear.”

Some people who were not in their rooms said the experience was more frightening.

Brian Boone ’12 was in the basement of Holder Hall when the alerts were sent.

“I was in the computer study, and my heart skipped a beat, and I proceeded to grab my pepper spray and my heavy books,” Boone said. “[They are] blunt objects ... I walked into my neighbor’s room, and [the people] froze.”

The alerts even had global repercussions. Hsih got an e-mail from her roommate studying abroad in Australia about an hour after the alert asking if Hsih and her other roommates were okay.

Hsih said she realized she was not registered with PTENS when she didn’t receive an alert and signed up for the service the next morning. Hsih said she was glad that her friends and fellow students made her aware of the potential danger.

“I think that the thing I got out of that night,” Hsih said, “was how much people cared.”

Senior writers Jack Ackerman and Paolo Esquivel and staff writers Gabriel Debenedetti and Melanie Jearlds contributed reporting.