BUZZ
‘Everybody is a little panicky,’ one student said
A shooting threat Wednesday near the university where Charlie Kirk was shot and killed rattled the campus community ahead of the anniversary of the conservative icon’s death next week.
Some students reported feeling upset over the incident, in which a white female in her 20s wearing a black backpack had allegedly threatened to shoot a small group of people at an apartment complex next to campus.
An email alert sent to students had told them the “suspect was seen at 12:29 p.m. walking eastbound in a pedestrian tunnel between campus and The Green [apartments].” She was apprehended a few hours later, KUTV news reported.
One UVU student told the outlet that police had swarmed the apartments.
“Ton of police, one guy holding a big AR. I’m like, ‘Dang, what’s going on?’” the student said. “Then I get an email about something about this girl’s had a threat and keep an eye out. So, everybody is a little panicky; I’m in a big group chat with a lot of people.”
Some also believe the female suspect had said weird things in class prior to the threat, which also prompted the lockdown of a middle school nearby.
“My friend was like, ‘Yeah, she was in my class saying a bunch of crazy stuff,’” the student told KUTV.
Some frustrations were published on UVU’s Reddit page in response, with a student posting that while the middle school went into lockdown “all we got was an email 2 hours later saying they hadn’t caught the suspect yet?”
“When I was fleeing campus last year the main thing that stuck out to me was just how widely unprepared and uninformed we were. And how much worse it would have been if it was a mass shooting,” the post stated.
“I thought things would be different when we came back to school. I thought professors would get trainings and evacuation plans and we would do drills or something. But nope. Nothing. And now just a week before the anniversary I’m shown exactly how little things have changed.”
Utah Valley University has already canceled classes for this coming Sept. 10, the day of Kirk’s murder.
