‘Feeling pretty terrified,’ UNC students and faculty wait out lockdown after shooting

Jackie Ruiz, a master’s student at UNC-Chapel Hill, was walking on the main campus quad when she received the first Alert Carolina message on Monday afternoon.

“Emergency: Police report an Armed and Dangerous Person On or Near Campus,” Alert Carolina said at 1:03 p.m. in the first of a series of messages. Only later would the campus learn that a UNC-Chapel Hill faculty member had been killed in a shooting and a suspect taken into custody.

Ruiz ran into a nearby classroom building and sheltered in a closet with other students, she said, describing the situation as “a waiting game” as she heard “more and more police sirens” from her location.

Shortly after 4 p.m., the campus lockdown was lifted. Students began spilling out of buildings and, having spent three hours in lockdown, were noticeably jumpy.

‘Confusing’ and ‘stressful’

Alex Bredar, a post-doctoral scientist, said she was coming downstairs in a classroom building when she heard, “Don’t go that way! There’s a shooter in there.”

She hid in a chemistry lab for about 30 minutes with roughly six other people until officers evacuated her.

”It was hard to tell if they were announcing themselves as officers or if they were the shooter,” Bredar said. “It was confusing.”

You think you hear gunshots in a public place. How should you respond?

Neha Dewett spent three hours locked in a lab at UNC Hospitals, where she works. She was just getting out at 4:45 p.m.

”It was stressful and annoying,” she said. “Even knowing the shooter wasn’t in the lab, you don’t know where he is. We’re still a little bit stressed. Our brain is not working.”

‘That was terrifying’

Katherine Snow Smith, 55, a freelance writer and graduate student at UNC, said Monday afternoon she was in “The Pit” on campus, a busy area near the student union and the student store.

Around 1:10 p.m., she said, “These loud sirens went off. They sounded like the bomb sirens you used to hear during the Cold War. They were creepy-sounding, so you knew something was going on.

“There were lots of people out there, and we all stopped and looked up, because there was some kind of announcement. But nobody could understand anything. We were all looking at each other and asking, ‘What did they say? What did they say?’

“Somebody said, ‘Maybe it’s a tornado,’ and I thought, ‘I need to get to my car.’ So I started to go for it. But then somebody said, ‘School shooting! School shooting! Gunman on campus!’ and everybody started running. They were telling people to go inside and get into rooms.”

Smith went with others into the student union, where she was ushered into a closet she said measured about 5 feet by 8 feet. At least 25 others went in with her, she said, including a student who works in the building.

They closed the door and got quiet, everyone pulling out their phones to look at the alerts they were now getting telling them to take shelter. They began to contact friends and family to tell them they were hiding out but OK.

Smith said she texted her three children, but told them not to tell her mom what was going on to avoid scaring her. Later, she called a friend and told her to let her mother know and to tell her she was OK.

At first, Smith said, everyone in the closet was standing, “in case we had to run.” But after an hour, all but two people sat down. Those two remained standing for the duration, Smith said.

Smith said the group was wondering if the closet door was locked to the outside when suddenly it opened.

“That was terrifying,” she said, but it was just another young woman looking for a place to hide.

Conflicting information

As they waited, they got the same conflicting information as those watching events from outside campus, across North Carolina and even outside the United States: First, a suspect had been arrested. Then no, that person had been cleared and released. First they heard there had been a shooting in one building on campus, then no, it was a different building. A student had been shot? Or was it a professor?

Eventually, Smith’s phone died, and she used her laptop to send a few emails to people.

Meanwhile, she said, the student with the job at the student union was getting updates through some official sources. At one point, he was told he could let people out of the closet to use the bathroom, as some had requested, but he couldn’t let them back in.

Around 3:35 p.m., Smith said, the young man got word that it was safe to leave the closet and exit the building. The group did so, along with others who had been hiding in different places around the building.

There were no police escorts, no campus officials, just an eerie feeling of tense freedom, Smith said. She quickly made her way toward her car, which she said was parked on Franklin Street. On her way, she ran into a student who is the son of a friend.

“Are you OK?” she asked. Yes, he said, asking her the same. He had been holed up inside the Carolina Coffee Shop on Franklin Street since the sirens sounded.

“It’s just bizarre to me that these kids have been practicing this since they were 5 or 6 years old,” Smith said. “And here today it came true.”

Staff writer Korie Dean contributed to this report.