Today was a scary day at the University of South Florida. There were multiple incidents across campus occurring, leaving students and faculty on edge as messages reached cell phones reporting armed intruders and a man with a cowboy hat, puppy hat, and hunting knife.
Several buildings on campus were put on lock-down and police entered the library in search of a suspected intruder. This building is just one building over from my class so you can imagine how uneasy it made me feel that I could be that close to someone who might have actually brought a weapon onto the USF Tampa Campus.
We then recieved word that someone on a bull runner had taken hostages or something of that degree and we started popping out our laptops, cell phones, and iPod Touches to search for some kind of news reports; finding news from far away places such as New York and a few local news stations. Class ended and we saw people outside acting normal. Just sitting around. I thought to myself: How can people just sit so calmly? Don’t they remember the events of historic shootings such as Virginia Tech?
Text messages continued to come to our phones telling us to avoid campus if possible. I didn’t feel safe in my own school. There were no police in Cooper Hall where I was at. A few minutes later we got an alert that there was someone spotted walking around with a hunting knife in…Cooper Hall! Talk about scary. After that message I didn’t want to be at school anymore. Desperate to get as far away from USF as possible.
When I finally got out and drove onto I-75 back to my house I felt relief as I got further and further away. Grateful that I wasn’t living on campus and that I had a car and seriously evaluating how safe it is to go to school these days. Apparently during the Summer 2009 semester there were threats like this almost everyday, but normally responses were quicker and cleared. Today it took a few hours before it was all clear.
They discovered that the suspect on the Bull Runner claimed to be “just kidding” about having a supposed bomb. Way to ruin a bunch of peoples day dude. I arrived in my town starving from all the stress that had just gave me. Taking the phone calls from family members and friends I let everyone know that I was thankfully safe and that such a scary day didn’t cause me any harm.
