The Unmentioned

The mayor of Jersey City, N.J., said a handwritten note that forced St. Peter's College to lock down its campus threatened violence against the school, but it made no mention of bombs or guns.

Police immediately ordered the campus closed while they began searching each room of each building at the school, which has about 3,000 students.("Lockdown Lifted At New Jersey College")

This breaking news version of the story is, appropriately enough, short and sweet. The little details--"a handwritten note," "3,000 students," etc.--are important in this story because they help put the threat in perspective. The fact that it was a handwritten note suggests that there may be an opportunity to analyze the handwriting to try to find out who is responsible, and the fact that 3,000 students attend the school hint at the difficulty of managing the situation.

A combination of threatening e-mails from a jilted high school student in Texas and a note taped in a stairwell in McDermott Hall that ominously referred to the April 2007 Virginia Tech killings led to the five-hour lockdown and evacuation of 1,500 students at St. Peter's College on Wednesday, officials said yesterday. ... By 4:30 p.m. yesterday, Corpus Christi, Texas, police arrested Christy Perez, 18, for making terroristic threats and false public alarm, Comey said. A male freshman at St. Peter's College met Perez online and they developed a relationship during which he visited her several times, according to the police chief.

The two then had a falling out, and Perez sent threatening e-mails to the female roommate of the St. Peter's student on Tuesday, Comey said. The roommate contacted police.
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On Wednesday, police were called to the college when a note was found that referred to Virginia Tech slayings and stated, "All would die here today."

The note and e-mails, combined with what turned out to be a false report that the female roommate's tires had been slashed, triggered the huge response. More than a dozen law enforcement agencies locked down the college, searched it and evacuated it at a cost as high as $250,000, Comey said.
"E-mail death threat a factor in lockdown"

The information in this article is much more accurate than the info found in the breaking news story. Further investigation revealed that two incidents--"which police now believe to be unrelated"--were responsible for the lockdown. The article also mentions that only 1,500 students were evacuated and that the lockdown required the efforts of over twelve law enforcement agencies and would end up costing about $250,000. These elaborate details seem to sharpen the focus on what really happened on Wednesday.

"It sent chills down my spine," St. Peter's President Eugene J. Cornacchia said Thursday. "It was chilling, especially given all the things that have happened recently, to see a note threatening violence in our community."

Cornacchia was shown the note by Art Youmans, the school's director of campus safety, shortly after its discovery in a campus building at a little after 10:30 a.m. They jointly decided to issue a lockdown order through the school's text-messaging system and notify Jersey City police.
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School officials and police have declined to divulge specific contents of the note, other than to confirm that it referenced last April's Virginia Tech massacre in which gunman Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people before taking his own life.
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Wednesday's threat put the school's text-message alert system to its first test. The system, made by Spring Lake-based Privatel Inc., was installed last fall in response to the Virginia Tech shootings.

The first text-message to students and staff was sent out within a few minutes of the discovery of the note. By the time many students opened their cell phones and received the message, police had already been called and were en route, according to Youmans."St. Peter's president: Threat note 'sent chills down my spine'"

This news article relates the events at St. Peter's College to the "Virginia Tech massacre," and shows how such tragedies have prompted schools to respond by using technology to find safety solutions like the text-messaging service at St. Peter's. However, this article places the focus on the larger threat of the handwritten note--which was a threat against the entire school--and doesn't even mention the e-mail threats described in the local story. Obviously, at the national level, the news wasn't the lovers' quarrel.

In the event of an emergency on Seton Hill's campus, I think the Setonian could play an important role by assisting in the investigation afterwards and using its resources to gather facts and information quickly. The early news stories about the lockdown at St. Peter's were inaccurate and misleading in some ways, but a student newspaper would probably be in a better position to get the real story out before other news organizations.