BLACKSBURG Va. – Memories of the worst mass school shooting in U.S. history at Virginia Tech came flooding back when the campus locked down after reports of a man with a gun, although some who were told to stay indoors treated the warnings with a shrug.
The university on Thursday issued the longest, most extensive lockdown and search on campus since the 2007 massacre. It came after three teenage girls attending a summer camp on campus reported to university police that they saw a man with a possible gun as they walked to the dining hall.
The school lifted the lockdown more than five hours later after a search for such a man was unsuccessful and police had no real leads.
Mohammed Al-Halali, a sophomore taking a summer architecture design lab, said the shootings that killed 33 people were “the first thing that came to mind” when he got the emergency alert and he received many texts from friends to make sure he was all right.
Still, he said he never felt unsafe and he thought the police would have things under control. He said the news media was hyping it.
University spokesman Larry Hincker said all voicemail, text-messaging, e-mail and social-media alerting systems worked without a hitch, and that issuing such a warning was necessary. Still, some continued to stroll about the 2,600-acre campus, despite requests to stay indoors. Several thousand students and the school’s 6,500 employees were on campus for summer classes.
“People have the right to do what they want to do,” Hincker said. “People have their own free will.”
