Virginia Tech settled a lawsuit after failing to show an eMail from a suicidal student.
The eMail that arrived at Virginia Tech’s health center in November 2007 was detailed and unmistakably ominous. It concerned a Tech senior named Daniel Kim and came from an acquaintance at another college.
“Daniel has been acting very suicidal recently, purchasing a $200 pistol, and claiming he’ll go through with it,” the eMail read, adding details of a reported previous suicide attempt with pills. “This is not a joke.”
By the time Virginia Tech told Daniel’s father, William Kim, about that eMail, it was too late.…Read More
Virginia Tech students said they received a nearly constant stream of text message and eMail updates from school officials after a gunman killed a campus police officer and himself Thursday afternoon.
Virginia Tech’s homepage provided updated information about the shootings, the suspect, and what students and faculty members should do while police scour the campus. Students and the campus’s student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, tweeted updates throughout the afternoon.
At 2:59 p.m., about three hours after the first reports of a police officer shot to death during a routine traffic stop, final exams were postponed. Exams were slated to start Dec. 9. Police would not confirm if the second body found in a nearby parking lot known as “the cage” was that of the gunman’s; however, a law enforcement official who had knowledge of the case and spoke on condition of anonymity told The Associated Press that the gunman was believed to be dead.…Read More
Universities have failed in recent years to send alerts to students.
A two-inch keychain might be the solution for campus officials hoping to avoid public scrutiny next time their emergency text messages hit a logjam and don’t reach student and faculty cell phones.
IntelliGuard Systems’ RavenAlert, which provides the campus community with a keychain that rings when it receives an emergency message, avoids delays by sending thousands of messages over a private wireless network.
So instead of connecting to a myriad of mobile devices – all with different internet protocol addresses – the RavenAlert system sends the college’s alert to thousands of keychains with the same address.…Read More
According to the Associated Press, a 20-year-old student pulled out a revolver and shot another man in the thumb during an argument on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University, authorities said Monday. The campus of 24,660 about 30 miles southeast of Nashville was on alert for about 45 minutes. Police say Justin Macklin, a MTSU student from Memphis, got into an argument and shot at Austin Morrow of Murfreesboro, wounding the 20-year-old former student. Police said Macklin has been charged with carrying a weapon on school grounds, aggravated assault and reckless engdangerment. He was released on $18,500 bond from the Rutherford County jail, authorities said. A spokeswoman said there was no record of an attorney in the case, and added a court hearing is scheduled March 2. MTSU Police Chief Buddy Peaster said the two men had problems in the past but he did not say what prompted the shooting or elaborate on what they had argued about…
More than a dozen visiting professors and retired teachers helped fill the void on a rotating basis.
It’s been a year since a Harvard-educated professor opened fire during a faculty meeting in a conference room at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, killing three colleagues and wounding three others. Ever since, those staff meetings have been held elsewhere.
Professor Debra Moriarity, who narrowly escaped dying that day, works in an office nearby and said it’s too much to go back in.
“That conference room has been closed up since after the incident,” she said. “They went in, cleaned it and repainted it, but we don’t use it.”…Read More
The UAH shootings could bring more attention to text message alert systems, experts say.
Nearly an hour passed before University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) officials dispatched emergency notification to students and faculty after fatal shootings allegedly committed by a professor, raising new questions about campus-based alert systems.
University President David Williams sent an eMail to faculty and students Feb. 15—three days after the shootings that killed three people and injured three others—and said campus police responded to the gunfire within minutes, but the university community was not alerted via text message or eMail.
“… Some of you are understandably troubled about the speed with which a text message alert was sent following the shootings,” Williams said in his open letter to UAH students and faculty. “As any institution would do after an incident like this, our university will conduct a complete examination of the emergency response. How to more effectively use the university’s text message system in the midst of a fast-moving, life-threatening situation will certainly be part of that review.”…Read More
Campus leaders are searching for answers in the aftermath of another deadly shooting.
Tragedy rocked the University of Alabama campus in Huntsville Feb. 12 when a female biology professor allegedly gunned down six colleagues, three of them fatally, in an apparent dispute over tenure.
After the initial shock, higher-education officials from across the nation are reviewing the details to see if there is anything they can learn from the latest deadly campus shooting.
Amy Bishop, 42, a Harvard-educated neurobiologist who became an assistant professor at the school in 2003, has been charged with capital murder—a rare instance of a woman being accused in a mass shooting. Bishop, known as a bright woman who some students said struggled to explain complicated topics, is also a mother of four children.…Read More
