Students concerned over lack of MU Alert for Sunday shooting

Students are expressing concern after a shooting that left two injured on Ninth Street early Sunday morning was not reported via MU Alert.

The shooting happened in downtown Columbia near the Rise on Ninth apartments, which house undergraduate students through MU Residential Life. The victims were a 31-year-old male and a 33-year-old female, the Missourian has reported. They were in stable condition Sunday when they were taken to the hospital.

The MU Police Department was aware of the incident but did not determine it to be an “immediate or ongoing threat” to students on campus, said Sara Diedrich, MU police public safety information specialist. Diedrich said the decision to send an MU Alert is left to the judgment of MU police.

MU Alerts are sent out when there is a “significant emergency or dangerous situation that involves an immediate threat to the health and safety of students, faculty and staff on campus or nearby property,” Diedrich said. According to MU spokesperson Christian Basi, the MU Police Department evaluates these situations on a minute-by-minute basis and, with the information they had Sunday, did not consider this one an immediate threat to campus.

Basi said there is no set checklist or line to determine imminent threats to campus, as creating a binding definition may cause some threats to go unreported.

“If you define it, you run the risk of missing important, actual, imminent and inherent dangers to the campus — if you define it, if you put it into a box,” Basi said. “How would you define an imminent inherent danger in such a way to make sure that it is done (the same) way (every) time? And then what happens if something is slightly deviated from that?”

The shooter has still not been identified; Toni Messina, communications and outreach supervisor for the Columbia Police Department, said in an email Monday there was no new information to report on the incident.

“There’s many factors that go into making these decisions, and at the time, MUPD worked closely with other area agencies to just gather as much information as they could as quickly as they could in this situation, and the decision was made,” Diedrich said.

Many students took to social media to share disappointment in the lack of an official MU Alert, especially considering the event happened near campus and residential life apartments. It also took place during Homecoming weekend, which often includes heavy weekend celebrations not only from MU students but community members and alumni.

One MU student, Julia Bursby, shared a photograph taken from her Rise on Ninth apartment of the scene on Twitter.

Bursby said she heard commotion outside her window, including people yelling to run. Multiple firetrucks and police cars were on the scene quickly after, as well as armed police officers, she said.

“I had seen the people that live across from me in their apartment taking videos and calling people, and I had seen a lot of people stop and stare, and I was like, ‘Yeah, this doesn’t feel like something out of the blue, like someone’s drunk or someone got into a bar fight,’” Bursby said.

Marc Brazeal, another MU student living at the Rise apartments, had a similar experience. After hearing bangs from his apartment he thought to be gunshots, he saw someone carried off on a stretcher from his window and assumed that there had been a shooting.

“I was very frustrated that MU didn’t send out an alert,” Brazeal said in an Instagram message. “I figured it was because they didn’t want to scare people on Homecoming, but I think an alert should’ve been sent because I was messaging my friends to tell them about it so that they’d avoid being out.”

Other students shared concern that they were informed by less reliable sources, including Snapchat, YikYak, Twitter or class group chats.

“It’s just scary knowing that we had no idea what was going on and there was not even, even still, no mention of what was happening or even just a message from the university,” Bursby said. “We’re not getting any sort of the protection that we were kind of advertised — whenever we’ll get these alerts, and we’ll know what’s going on, and we’ll have consistent updates.”

Diedrich recommended students take other safety precautions to help in these situations.

“We encourage our students to keep themselves safe,” Diedrich said. “Use the buddy system, look out for each other, be aware of your surroundings, all of those things. No matter where you are, if you’re on or off campus, just to be aware of your surroundings.”

While the downtown area is Columbia Police Department jurisdiction, the MU Police Department can, in some cases, be involved in situations off-campus, Diedrich said in an email. MU police and Columbia police are partnered to protect the campus community, and MU police often work alongside Columbia police to determine threats to the area.

Messina said in an email she was unable to address wider concerns of downtown safety or plans for the future that were raised after this weekend’s events.

MU Alerts are not reserved for events that happen on campus. Alerts for off-campus events in the past have included armed robberies and shots fired near campus, including events on or near Ninth Street.

While Basi compared these events to this weekend’s shooting in terms of safety, he said he could not speak to what factors made those events receive an alert and this weekend’s shooting not. The MU Police Department does review emergency situations after they happen and sometimes releases crime notifications via email for events later on.

While Basi acknowledged students’ concerns for safety this weekend, he said MU police worked with the information provided.

“I’m also asking for the respect of the police experience, to know that with the information that they had coming in that there was no ongoing threat to the campus or to the surrounding area, and that’s why the decision was made,” Basi said.

Still, students said they wished the situation had been handled differently.

“I think that the right thing to do would be to give a statement regarding — and maybe even a justification as to why or reasoning as to why they didn’t speak on it,” Bursby said. “I don’t think there’s anything they could do to rectify that situation, other than to get better in the future. But I do think a statement would be necessary, because at the end of the day, it did leave students in the dark and gave a potential for danger.”