Click here to read the accompanying story about Jamie Bishop

In the span of a few hours on the morning of April 17, Virginia Tech senior Cho Seung-Hui unleashed a hail of bullets on campus that left 32 people dead before he killed himself.

People all over the world wondered how such a thing could happen on a tranquil campus in the Virginia foothills. For many, the tragedy raised the question: Could it happen here?

As Chancellor James Moeser said in his e-mail to the campus community, “No campus is immune from what happened at Virginia Tech. No university campus is a safe haven.”

Wanton acts of random violence can happen anywhere. And on a much smaller scale, they already have happened in Chapel Hill.

In 1995, law student Wendell Williamson walked through downtown Chapel Hill with a rifle and killed two people and wounded a police officer before he was stopped. Last year, Carolina graduate Mohammed Rez Taheri-Azar was arrested for driving a Jeep SUV through an area around the Pit, where he struck nine people. Fortunately, none died.

The University uses every incident, no matter where it happens, as a springboard to reassess its public safety and health policies.

“At Carolina, we are always looking for ways to improve campus safety,” Moeser said. “And just as we always do in the wake of a security issue on this campus, we also will learn from the Virginia Tech tragedy.”

STORY CONTINUES BELOW PHOTO

A network of safeguards
The University community consists of about 37,000 students, faculty and staff who occupy a 795-acre campus with some 400 buildings. In many ways, it functions like a small city
protected by the Department of Public Safety.

The department is a nationally accredited police force consisting of 53 sworn officers. It includes a detective team, special bike patrols, a larceny reduction unit, a traffic and pedestrian safety unit, a specially trained bomb-sniffing dog, a full-service 911 response center, a silent witness program to encourage the reporting of suspicious activities and extensive mutual aid agreements with area municipal and county agencies.

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, the department, along with other campus police departments across the country, is re-evaluating security measures now in place, said Deputy Director Jeff McCracken.

It is a process public safety officers have followed before, he said.

As a result of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo., University public safety officers conducted active shooter drills as part of their in-service training, McCracken said. The course, developed by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT), seeks to increase the ability of first responders to effectively respond to — and stop — an active shooter. The training covers various deployment tactics, formations and cornering strategies.

The Columbine shootings forced law enforcement departments to change their protocols, which previously were based on hostage situations where a drama slowly unfolds and can be defused, McCracken said.

Similarly, he said, the protocol to a dangerous situation on a college campus is based on a “shelter in place” philosophy, where people are instructed either to remain inside or if they are outside, to seek shelter at the closest building. However, the situation at Virginia Tech demonstrated that there is no one tactical response to fit all situations because the students killed were inside buildings, he said.

For flexibility, it is important to have, as the University does, a general framework for how to respond to any incident.

Making the right calls
Such a framework is based on solid communication, McCracken said.

And as the Virginia Tech tragedy attests, it is crucial to improve and expand the means to communicate with thousands of people while a situation is in progress, no matter where people might be.

“Even before this happened, campuses I have worked with through professional organizations have all been wrestling with this same question,” he said. “How do you do real-time emergency communications with all members of your community?”

McCracken said no single high-tech system can solve the problem. That is why the University already had begun developing a multi-layered strategy.

For instance, some 400 students are involved in a pilot program based in the Department of Housing and Residential Education in which students can receive warnings in text messages on their cell phones.

Many University employees and students can be reached by e-mail or text messages, but there are some work groups — including housekeepers and groundskeepers — who can’t rely on electronic communication, McCracken said.

As part of the University’s Crisis Communication Plan, a range of communication tools has been developed. For groups that work outside or do not have an office, the University has developed contingency plans that include radio systems and telephone trees that could reach employees during a crisis, McCracken said.

The University has started shopping for a siren system to be installed throughout campus to notify people of emergency situations. McCracken said people would have to be trained to understand what the signals mean. University officials hope the new system can include the capability to make prominent public address announcements.

In recent years, Carolina has installed about 185 emergency call boxes across campus in major quadrangles, pedestrian areas and parking decks. The call boxes are nine feet tall and have a blue light on top. Anyone on campus is encouraged to use the call boxes to report suspicious activity or to seek help. Users push the button to automatically alert police where they are. Police will respond immediately.

Public safety officials and student government leaders are working together this spring to update how the call boxes are maintained.

But communication involves much more than technology, McCracken said. It also requires an organizational structure capable of making the right decisions at the right time.

That responsibility falls to Carolina’s Emergency Warning Committee, which is charged with informing and protecting the University community during events ranging from violence on campus to the threat of a tornado or hurricane. The committee decides how to inform the campus community in a timely
manner of events or activities that constitute a threat to personal safety.

In deciding the appropriate steps to take, the committee considers a host of factors, from the nature of the threat to the need to inform students, families, faculty, staff and the general public to the likely duration of the event and the number of people affected.

If the situation warrants it, the committee will activate the Crisis Communication Plan to make sure that on- and off-campus groups receive fast and accurate information. People can expect to receive information in a variety of ways, including:

  Campus e-mails marked “Urgent” and broadcast voice-mail messages;

  Prominent postings on the University’s website (either the main page, www.unc.edu, or the Department of Public Safety’s page, www.dps.unc.edu, which reserves space for emergency information);

  Building-by-building notifications or public address announcements by officers patrolling campus;

  Messages and updates on the University Access Channel on cable television; and

  Information on the University’s Weather and Emergency Hotline, 843-1234.

Fighting the fear factor
Law enforcement readiness and adequate communications are not the entire solution, however. As Faculty Chair Joe Templeton said last week in an e-mail message to faculty members, a community has to resist the generalized fear of danger that a crisis inevitably spawns.

“In your classroom conversations with students, please reassure them that Carolina has a plan and a process to ensure the safety of our campus,” he said.

The sadness at such a staggering loss of life, Templeton said, is compounded by the connections that many faculty, staff and students had with people at Virginia Tech (see the accompanying story at left on former employee Jamie Bishop).

“As we grieve for the lives lost as a result of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, we must recognize that the events of yesterday will influence many of us here in Chapel Hill in the days ahead,” Templeton said.

Templeton also reinforced that extra counseling opportunities were offered for any student or community member in need of assistance. In addition, the Counseling and Wellness Services office in the Taylor Campus Health Services Building regularly provides counseling services for students.

Balancing safety and freedom
A central issue is the role of both the institution and the individuals in the community in reporting troubling behavior to police.

At Carolina, the Emergency Evaluation and Action Committee is contacted when situations involving students suggest that their behavior poses danger to themselves or others. The group’s review of a situation can include psychological evaluations, witness statements and conversations with the student and his or her parents.

Moeser called on the Carolina community to respond to the Virginia Tech tragedy by thinking of what can be done to make our campus as safe as it can be. But he also warned of going too far. In an interview with WRAL last week, Moeser said, “I think it would be a tragedy if the American college campus became a security compound.”

The Carolina campus, like others across the country, is designed to invite people in, not keep them out. The University attracts visitors with diverse interests. In a typical week, for example, officials estimate that about 75,000 people visit University libraries.

While the chancellor or his designee has the authority to close public access to the campus if a situation poses an imminent danger to the University community, Moeser said it was important to “balance that sense of openness, transparency and freedom with the feeling of safety.”

Officials cannot completely cut off access to the entire University, McCracken said. But it is possible to use law enforcement and transportation personnel to limit access to particular areas of campus and to create perimeters and warn campus community members to follow appropriate safety procedures when a situation warrants it.

Members of the University community can play a role in increasing safety by paying close attention to what is going on around them, McCracken said. If they notice a situation that looks out of the ordinary, they should not hesitate to report it to his department. “The Department of Public Safety relies heavily on the citizens on campus to help us do our job. Anybody who feels there is any kind of suspicious activity or is feeling discomfort in a situation should not hesitate to contact us immediately,” he said.

People can call anonymously through the department’s 911 system, McCracken said.

“As the chancellor has said, we are not immune to these kinds of things,” he added, “but we strive every day to make the campus as safe as possible and we will continue to do that.”

The University has posted information about safety and security online at www.unc.edu/news/archives/apr07/safetyq-a041907.html.

Carolina mourns one of its own

Jacques Morin thought about his old friend almost as soon as he heard about the shootings at Virginia Tech. At 11:30 a.m., he dashed off a quick e-mail to him that read: “Jamie, Just thinking of you and your wife. I hope everything is OK. Get back to me when you can…  Jacques.”

Then he sat back and waited for the reassuring response that never came.

His friend, Christopher James “Jamie” Bishop, was among the first to die on the morning of April 16. At about 9:50 a.m., he was teaching a class in introductory German when Cho Seung-Hui burst into the room in Norris Hall, aimed a gun at Bishop’s head and fired.

Morin, the associate director of educational technology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Bishop had started working together as academic technology liaisons in spring 2004. Their job was to help professors integrate technology into their teaching. Morin worked with professors in the social sciences, while Bishop worked with faculty, staff and students in the Romance languages, comparative literature, linguistics, Asian studies and Germanic and Slavic languages.

The job was a perfect fit for Bishop, Morin said. “He was a natural teacher, and he loved technology. If he could find a way to combine those two things, he was the happiest.”

Bishop especially enjoyed teaching the German language, which is what he left Carolina to do in 2005.

While earning his B.A. in German at the University of Georgia, he was named a Fulbright scholar and studied at Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany. After earning an M.A. in German at the University of Georgia, he spent four years in Germany, where he met his future wife, Stefanie Hofer.

Hofer led Bishop to Chapel Hill in 2001 when she accepted a position in Carolina’s doctoral program for German literature. Bishop and Hofer were the only tenure-track professors in the German program at Virginia Tech, the chair of the department told the Los Angeles Times.

Much has been said and written about Bishop in the days after his death, about the kind of cherished friend and teacher he had been to so many. He was an avid hiker who could play a mean game of racquetball. He was fan of films and the Atlanta Braves, having grown up in Pine Bluff, Ga.

Even at the age of 35, he still wore big, round granny glasses and his hair long enough to tie in a ponytail. He rode his bike to campus. After his classes ended, he sometimes lingered when students wanted extra help. Recently, he had applied for an M.F.A. program in photography and graphic design at Radford University near Virginia Tech.

All of these things made Bishop interesting, Morin said, but what truly made him remarkable was that he was an incredibly happy person — and he had a gift for making the people around him happy, too. He was the guy who went to sit across the lunchroom table from the new kid who didn’t have any friends. And when Morin was the new guy in the department, it was Bishop who made him feel at home.

In the days after Bishop’s death, one of the things Morin cannot get out of his head is the unanswered e-mail message. Morin went home the day of the shootings with an uneasy feeling, having not heard back from Bishop, who always responded to e-mail quickly. Then he turned on the TV and saw a German student talking about his German instructor who had been shot.

And at that exact moment, he knew.

 “I had this horrible, awful feeling,” Morin said. Two hours later, a friend called to deliver the sad news.

“I know it sounds silly, but I said to my wife that one of the hardest things about this is that Jamie never answered that e-mail,” Morin said. “That really gets to me. There is no one who will ever read that e-mail. I can’t explain it, but thinking about that leaves me with a huge emptiness.”