Local colleges pledged to review emergency procedures in wake of the massacre Monday at Virginia Tech.
“I want to assure every parent and every member of our campus family that we are reviewing our own safety and security measures in light of this tragedy,” said C.D. Mote Jr., president of the University of Maryland, College Park, in a statement.
Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old senior majoring in English, shot and killed 33 people, including himself, Monday in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
At least one Marylander was injured in the shooting. Catonsville High School graduate Justin Klein was shot twice in the leg and once in the arm.
Reached on his cell phone at Montgomery Regional Hospital in Blacksburg, Klein said he is expected to make a full recovery.
“I don?t wish to talk about the incident at this time,” he said.
Virginia Tech officials have been criticized for waiting to notify students about the first shooting incident, which occurred in a dormitory at 7:15 a.m., via e-mail at 9:30 a.m.
“From all of the things that we [were] told, it was mass chaos,” said Katherine Andriole, assistant program director for Security on Campus Inc., a nonprofit that advocates for safer college campuses.
Most local college campuses rely on mass e-mails to notify students of emergencies.
At the University of Maryland, College Park, safety officers use campuswide e-mail, voicemail and the university Web site to notify students of emergencies. The university also has an Early Warning Siren and Storm Ready System.
Johns Hopkins University also sends a broadcast e-mail during emergencies and maintains an emergency Web page and emergency telephone number for students.
“I?m sure we will look at all kinds of questions coming out of this,” said Dennis O?Shea, a Johns Hopkins spokesman.
At Loyola College in Baltimore, administrators send mass e-mails and voicemails to notify students if there is a crime reported on campus. Information updates are posted on the Web, and the faculty conducts a telephone tree. The school also has a public announcement system on top of a central building on campus and numerous dorms.
Loyola spokesman Mark Kelly said the college is considering implementing a text-message alert system, a move safety officials say all campuses should consider.
“At 7:15, every single Virginia Tech student could have received a text that said do not leave your room,” Andriole said.
Rave Wireless, a company headquartered in New York, provides campuses with a Web-based administrative console for sending out broadcast alerts to students via text messaging.
“Our feeling is you can never really prevent all these different scenarios ? from date rape to bomb scares ? but what you can do is the more ways you have to communicate, especially with the device of choice, the more it gives the students the power to make decisions,” Rave Chief Executive Officer Rodger Desai said.
Examiner staff writer Joe Palazzolo contributed to this story.
