Shortly before 11 pm on Sunday night, shots were fired directly outside Alumni Hall. The altercation, reportedly a bar fight, left no one hurt, and no one affiliated with NYU was involved. Cops appeared almost immediately after the incident and swarmed the area, marking it with police tape, said one resident of Alumni.
Antoinette Chang, a sophomore, rushed to her window after receiving a call from a friend.
“We looked out the window and could see sirens – lights – flashing,” said Whitney Meer, her suitemate. “All the security guards were standing at the front door, looking very worried. We went outside, then back in.”
Though ultimately no one was harmed, the fear students felt was very real.
“The first thing I did was text [my parents] that, if they heard about it, I was fine,” said Meer. “After that, I wanted to know that everyone – in the dorm – was OK. And then I wanted to know what was happening.”
Already made aware of the incident, Meer and her dormmates received an automated call from public safety reassuring them that nobody at NYU had been involved.
Onlookers reported to an NYU Local writer that they saw muzzle flashes, four people running away from the scene, and at least three “cups” on the ground – meaning that three shells or more had been fired. No one was “visibly hurt or detained.”
NYU students tweeted throughout the incident, one writing that she felt “safe” knowing there was no NYU involvement. Others complained about not receiving the University alert. (Most disturbingly, one complained about being woken up at 1 am by a text from the university.)
John Beckman, NYU’s VP of public affairs, explained why only some students got the text alert. It was sent only to the residents of the five nearby dorms: Alumni Hall, Brittany Hall, Coral Tower, Founders Hall, and Palladium Hall. ”If you weren’t a resident of one of these residence halls, you shouldn’t have received it,” Beckman said. “If there are students who didn’t receive the notifications who are in one of these residence halls, we definitely want to know: we’d want to sort out if there was some problem with our system, or whether it was a phone registration problem, or something else.”
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But why only send an alert to those students who are registered as living in those few dorms? Just because you don’t live there doesn’t mean you aren’t in the area. Although this situation turned out to have no injuries or casualties, I think there’s no reason to restrict the distribution of that information.
What about Third North? It’s like 2 blocks away.
@Dmitry: I live in Third North, we got a text message.
Yeah. School-wide warnings would seem like the common sense things to do. There are countless students who don’t live in those dorms but may be in the vicinity of it, either visiting friends or merely passing by.
Newsflash to NYU Public Safety: guns, bullets, and the people using them can MOVE. Not alerting the entire campus is just plain stupid, and the university isn’t made safer by keeping students in the dark.
Third North is closer than all of those dorms (except Alumni)… it’s one block away and I didn’t get a text message.
Yeah this is total crap. A friend of mine lives TWO blocks from there off campus in the East Village. A lot of students do–and Beckman knows the EV is a big off-campus hub for students.
A system wide alert would, however, probably include parents and other people who are no where near the incident, causing undue worry and possible strain on the system when nervous, far-flung parents call the school en masse.
@Nick – that may be true, but in a situation involving active gunfire very close to the main campus, as well as many of the dorms (not to mention other student residences) it only makes sense to assume the worst – and in that vein, it makes sense to alert everyone possible so that the majority of students, if not all of them, will be warned. Better to risk some unhappy phone calls than allow misinformation to put someone in danger. Besides, if they can restrict the alert to just a few dorms, surely they can have it be sent only to students, faculty, and staff.
@Nick – Something tells me that if they can limit an alert to just students in certain residences, they can send a similar alert to all NYC-based students without waking grandma in Arknasaw and giving her a heart attack.