Questions after Virginia Tech false alarm

BY REX BOWMAN
Media General News Service
Published: November 14, 2008

BLACKSBURG — Reports of gunfire inside a Virginia Tech dormitory briefly alarmed the campus Thursday until police determined the loud pops were caused by exploding nail-gun cartridges outside the building.

Related:

Tech says gunfire-like noises were from construction site

Police theorize that someone exploded the cartridges by slamming the lid of a trash bin on them, according to a statement from the university.

By the time investigators reached that conclusion, Virginia State Police and Montgomery County sheriff’s deputies had joined Tech police in patrolling the campus.

Also, Tech officials said several alerts were sent to the university community via e-mail, in-class message boards, the Tech homepage (http://www.vt.edu) and text messaging, but not all the messages arrived.

The university is now trying to determine why the system did not work exactly as designed.

“Some students were shaken up,“ said Justin Harrison, a computer engineering major. Harrison said those most rattled by the sudden arrival of police and the lockdown of Pritchard Hall were those students who were at Tech on April 16, 2007, when a gunman killed 32 students and teachers before killing himself.

Thursday’s incident began around 12:50 p.m., when campus police received a report of sounds resembling gunshots at Pritchard, a 1,000-bed dormitory.

Police arrived, secured the building and searched it room by room. After finding nothing, they re-opened the dormitory shortly before 3 p.m.

During the course of their investigation, they talked to witnesses who saw and heard two men outside Pritchard “exploding something,“ according to Tech’s statement. When police checked a nearby trash bin, they found the exploded cartridges.

Pritchard is not far from a construction site on campus.