Posted on 08/05/2011 2:16:33 PM PDT by marktwain
Virginia Tech posted information on its website on Thursday morning about the reported gunman sighting.
"I was pretty anxious," the sophomore said. "We had family friends who were up here when the shooting took place in 2007, so it was kind of surreal."
Responding cops found no sign of any man matching the description - 6 feet tall, clean-shaven, wearing a blue and white striped shirt, gray shorts and brown sandals.
A police sketch of the suspect showed a Doogie Howser-ish white man with close-cropped hair.
Earlier, emergency sirens howled across the Blacksburg, Va., campus as the university sent news of the threat to students via its Twitter, e-mail and text accounts.
No shots were fired, and there were no reports of any injuries before the suspect disappeared. The lockdown was still in effect hours after the alert.
No one other than the three children reported seeing a gunman, but Virginia Tech police Chief Wendell Flinchum said cops found their story credible.
The campus was swarming with law enforcement as school security was joined by police from nearby Blacksburg and Christiansburg, along with Virginia state police and Montgomery County sheriff's deputies.
FBI agents were also en route to the university.
"We're in a new era," college spokesman Larry Hincker told reporters. "Obviously this campus experienced something pretty terrible four years ago ... regardless of what your intuition and your experience as a public safety officer tells you, you are really forced to issue an alert."
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
Maybe the first couple of times, you are. Then when you realize that you are giving license to any idiot to shut down your multimillion dollar operation at will, you have to learn to be more selective....
Oops... not if you are a publicly funded institution.
When I saw the sketch, I thought Justin Beiber.
I wonder if those middle-schoolers who reported this were just a tinsy bit dishonest?
Would the authorities sound the sirens, put out twitter warnings, lock down the school, if such a kook was seen on campus, but with no visible gun??
No - they would rush to enroll him/her!
Even if there was someone with a firearm on the VT campus that’s not a crime. There is not a law on the books in the state of VA that prohibits a person from being armed on college campuses. If the person was found and was only carrying a gun legally then they would have a great lawsuit against the school and police for violating his rights should they have decided to detain him illegally.
I never did like that Doogie Howser...
We’ll see more of this as the Police State trains the “young’uns” to be good citizens and report any suspicious white males.
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