I'm trying to take into account this is a college campus. It's too early to speculate on how things were done or not done.

It looks like they were aware of the first shooting and investigating when the second shooting occurred. There have also been a rash of bomb threats on campus this week so that may have contributed to the lack of timely action.

I can't imagine the logistics of locking down a 25,000 student campus.

I have been thinking for a couple of hours that it would be really hard to notify everybody and lock down the campus if something like that happened here at 7am. I mean, a lot of people would be asleep until 10 minutes before a 9:30 class.

I dunno. IME everyone checks their email right before class, and RAs can be paged/called to patrol the halls. Obviously it's hard to say now whether a lockdown should have been called for, but if the police thought the killer was still alive, it really should have happened, and I'd be surprised if the school didn't have procedures in place for making school-wide announcements.

I have been thinking for a couple of hours that it would be really hard to notify everybody and lock down the campus if something like that happened here at 7am. I mean, a lot of people would be asleep until 10 minutes before a 9:30 class.

As a fellow University employee-- I agree. We have procedures to follow at the Medical Center, but none at the College proper (different campus).

IME everyone checks their email right before class, and RAs can be paged/called to patrol the halls. Obviously it's hard to say now whether a lockdown should have been called for, but if the police thought the killer was still alive, it really should have happened, and I'd be surprised if the school didn't have procedures in place for making school-wide announcements.

Right -- at the very least, RAs could have been informed and kept their residents inside. Off-campus students would be harder to notify, but probably not very, once people start calling and text-messaging.

Thinking of the campuses where I've been a student and also worked the word that keeps coming to mind is that they are very porous places -- every building has so many entries/exits, people coming/going, etc.

everyone checks their email right before class, and RAs can be paged/called to patrol the halls

and some people won't check their email, because they're late, or "right before class" means they're commuting and parking the car, and RAs are students who don't always sleep in their own beds, etc., etc.

It's been a few years, but I remember MSU being really freaking efficient about locking down dorms, but to be fair, this was usually at night after sporting events when they were expectings riots.

I don't miss the tear gas.

Reading the eyewitness accounts people linked to earlier, it seems like there are a lot of 8am classes at V. Tech. To which I say 1) wow, that would never fly here and 2) makes it harder to keep people corralled.

It's possible to email everyone on campus here, but that decision is only made at the very highest level, and I can totally see a college administration taking from 7 to 9 am to do that. Ours, anyway, which indeed takes like 2 hours to decide "It's snowing."

and I'd be surprised if the school didn't have procedures in place for making school-wide announcements.

Especially considering that there was an incident with an escaped prisoner there on campus just last Fall where a sheriff's deputy (? a law enforcement guy) was killed.

(I couldn't stand watching Flavor of Love for more than about ten minutes, but Charm School was kind of entertaining.)

Thank god someone else has admitted to watching this first. I am still ashamed to say that I've seen the Flavor of Love show, and even more horrifingly, the New York show, though only in about five-minute bursts, since that's all my poor brain can take.

The New York show was a lot more entertaining once I decided that she was based on Miss Piggy.

I got stupidly into I Love New York, and had to force myself not to watch the finale.

And when I was last in school, I lived way off campus and checked my school email sporadically, and would totally have shown up well after an announcement to stay home had gone out. Yikes.