A local teenager who police say cracked a bullwhip on Virginia Military Institute’s parade ground sparked panic about a possible active shooter and sent crowds of students fleeing from the barracks last Tuesday night, July 14.
Police and deputies from multiple agencies responded to reports of an armed person on post around 10:30 p.m. after cadets heard a loud noise outside that sounded like gunfire, VMI police chief Michael Marshall said.
Hundreds of cadets, incoming rats attending the Summer Transition Program (STP), and participants in the College Orientation Workshop (COW) for high school students were on campus at the time. The News-Gazette spoke to four incoming rats (who we are not identifying), who described the scary moments the news of a possible shooting on post started to circulate.
They said that at first, they heard loud cracking noises off-campus and asked their counselors if it was fireworks.
Then, the sounds got closer. “The counselors just came running, knocked on her door like, ‘Barricade the door!’ And then we had two counselors who went in our room and barricaded themselves with us,” one incoming rat said. “We waited maybe one or two minutes, and after that they told us, ‘Let’s just leave and evacuate.’” Some of the incoming rats described jumping over fences and gates, sprinting across the football field and up the stadium stairs and then taking shelter in people’s houses in the neighborhood above the stadium. Others described students hiding under construction fencing or barricading their doors inside the barracks.
“Those bullwhips really sounded like gunshots,” one incoming rat said. “Some people were really freaking out.”
As soon as officers arrived, the teenager with the whip was detained and questioned. Police officers set up a command post at VMI’s Emergency Operations Center and reviewed surveillance video while officers on the grounds used a K9 bomb sniffing dog to search for any shell casings to make sure there wasn’t a gunman.
“At this point, it was determined we did not have an active shooter on post,” Marshall said.
Marshall said the investigation into the teen’s motives is ongoing and that he may face charges. According to Marshall, it’s a crime in Virginia to use a bullwhip in a way which induces fear.
The teenager has not been publicly identified. As for possible charges, Marshall pointed out, some actions lead to consequences.
“It’s like the example if you stand up in a movie theater and you scream ‘Fire!’ and there’s no real fire,” Marshall said. “But you just say the word ‘fire’ and people start running.”
Marshall said the current student body is trained for emergency situations, and though the students in the STP and COW programs haven’t gone through that training, they likely went through similar active shooter training in high school.
“I spoke to two (senior) cadets personally myself, and they did what they were trained to do since they’ve been here VMI, and that’s run, hide, fight,” Marshall said.
Thankfully, only a handful of students ended up with minor injuries, and they were eventually escorted back to the barracks by police and counselors. The four incoming rats who spoke to the News-Gazette said that while the incident was scary, they’re not concerned about matriculating to VMI in the fall.
“You just don’t really expect that on a campus like this. A military campus,” one said. “We were caught off-guard.”
Marshall praised the swift response from multiple agencies, including the VMI Police, Lexington Police, Rockbridge County Sheriff’s Office, the Virginia State Police, security officers from Washington and Lee University and even the Lexington Fire Department.
“This was not a low-risk situation with a few responding officers. It required a lot of resources because of the nature of the call,” Marshall said, “To have your first officer on location within one minute, that’s pretty impressive.”
Marshall explained that VMI has an active shooter committee that practices various scenarios in buildings all across post. The VMI Police Department has 14 certified officers and four security officers, many of whom have dealt with active shooter incidents before. Marshall himself served on subcommittee meetings after the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007.
Marshall also said the school has a robust security system that allows them to lock down buildings with the touch of a button and an alert system that will ping cadet and staff phones during an emergency.
Still, some people on social media were concerned that VMI didn’t notify the public soon enough. W&L sent an alert out on Facebook around 11 p.m., telling students on campus to seek shelter. Both incoming rats and staff members told the News Gazette that they weren’t alerted via VMI’s emergency alert system until well after the incident unfolded, around 12 a.m.
Marshall said that after any incident like this on campus, officials have a series of meetings and discuss how they could have improved their response.
“The VMI Police will conduct a law enforcement after-action review, which will evaluate the incident, strengths, weaknesses and lessons learned,” Marshall said.
After the incident, counseling was available at the Cadet Counseling Center for anyone who needed it.
Marshall said VMI would be responsible for pressing any charges against the teenager.
“In this day and age, hoax threats will be taken seriously and aggressively investigated by law enforcement,” he said.
