University of Arkansas police are continuing to review what was a tense afternoon today on campus. At about 12:30 p.m., UAPD received a call that there was an active shooter in David W. Mullins Library. While law enforcement agencies were responding to that call, more calls came in. UAPD Assistant Chief Matt Mills said in all there were more than 300 landline calls and more than 30 911 calls in a short amount of time.
"All reporting either a suspect or shots fired," Mills said. "An active shooter event. From there, the officers were able to clear all of the buildings. We cleared them floor by floor, room by room, escorted many students, faculty and staff out of the buildings, and then were able to break down command and open the buildings.
"At this time, we have no record of shots fired, no injuries. It's looking as if this was another swatting or hoax call."
Assistant Chief Mills said law enforcement responded to calls about shooters across campus, from the library to Old Main to a residence hall to a new Art School building on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, and it took close to three hours to check and secure all of the locations. After the first call was received, the University community was alerted with messages ending with “Avoid. Deny. Defend.”
"So avoid," Mills said. "If you can get out, get out and take as many people with you as you can. If you cannot, then deny access. Barricade the doors, turn off the lights, and prepare to defend yourself if a threat comes in. I will say many of the buildings that we were able to, or many of the rooms that we were able to get people out of, had in fact turned off the lights, barricaded the doors, and there were many people in several of the rooms."
The University of Arkansas campus isn’t the only one to field hoax calls about an active shooter in the past few days. Iowa State, Northern Arizona, the University of Tennessee, the University of Southern California and Villanova have had similar incidents since late last week. Assistant Chief Mills said as of late afternoon Aug. 25, the investigation into the phone calls themselves was just beginning.
"Now we're starting to look at where the phone calls came from, what we might be able to do as far as tracing or pinging cell phones," he said. "But right now we don't have any of that information."
He said UAPD is already examining how they reacted and will soon conduct a post-incident review of how the matter was handled with the several other agencies that were involved.
