Seven hours passed before Longwood University officials decided to notify students of the four Farmville bodies discovered and of a suspected murderer on the loose; even though the crimes occurred within sight of Longwood’s campus and one body was identified as a university professor.
Longwood officials did not inform students willingly, instead the administration waited for the bombardment of phone calls from concerned parents before taking action according to www.hamptonroads.com.
Longwood Vice President for Student Affairs Tim Pierson sent out an e-mail informing unaware students and parents and updating people who already knew of the murders.
If VCU ever experiences a security emergency, such as those that occurred at Longwood University and Virginia Tech, emergency preparedness plans have been established and will be executed in a timely manner by the incident commander, stated Larry Mullendore, the senior emergency preparedness planner for VCU and the VCU Health System.
Dennis Sercombe, a Longwood vice president, reported to The Hampton Roads Pilot that no notification was sent out because of the decomposition rates of the bodies. The condition of the bodies suggested the deaths had occurred days earlier. Thus, Sercombe didn’t see a threat to the campus community.
“The critical piece of information was the timeline showed the crime didn’t happen Friday afternoon,” Sercombe stated. “Local police told university officials Friday evening there was ‘no imminent or verifiable threat’ to the campus community.”
Mullendore stated in an e-mail that VCU has implemented 14 units with a total of 221 emergency response plans in the emergency preparedness plan. The plans are updated annually, but if gaps are found, the plans are revised.
“VCU has the most robust alerting system of any college or university in the state,” Mullendore stated.
According to Mullendore, the Virginia Tech massacre motivated VCU to add several hazards to the risk assessment annex of the EPP, along with the purchase of 350 Alertus devices for installation in classrooms.
VCU emergency preparedness also encompasses 10 sirens, a text message dispatch system, 60 notification screens and Web homepage mass e-mails.
“If on or immediately proximate to Longwood’s campus, postings of information about a serious event could have been displayed on Web sites and on other media on campus,” Mullendore stated. “That information could include that the perpetrator is or is not known and is or is not in custody.”
Just because a Longwood professor was a victim does not mean that the alerting system should have been activated, Mullendore stated.
However, Mullendore stated an event on or immediately proximate to campus deserves attention from the incident commander to activate the appropriate alerting system.
“One must remember, the VCU alerting technologies were not resourced and employed to provide warnings to the non-VCU community who live next to campus,” Mulledore stated. “They are designed and activated to provide warnings to the VCU community only.”