Lockdown issued on Va. Tech campus

BLACKSBURG, Va.?? The campus of Virginia Tech, the site of a 2007 mass shooting that left 33 people dead, was under lockdown Thursday? after juveniles attending a summer camp told authorities they had seen a man carrying what looked like a gun.

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"Out of an abundance of caution, we are asking people to stay indoors for now," Larry Hincker, associate vice president for university relations, said at a news conference.

Police found no trace of the man but were still searching late Thursday morning, Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum told reporters.

The university issued an alert on its website at 9:37 a.m. telling students and employees to stay inside and secure doors.

A subsequent university crime alert said three children attending a Higher Achievement academic camp on campus reported seeing a man who appeared to have a gun covered with a cloth.

Flinchum said they interviewed the children and determined that their report was credible. Responding officers didn't find anyone matching the description.

"We have not had any further reported sightings ... or any more information regarding the sighting," Flinchum said.

Classes were canceled for the rest of the day. Hincker said he was not certain when the lockdown might be lifted.

"That's the $64,000 question," he said. "You get this report of a sighting that someone might have had a weapon. Then you've got this one-square-mile campus, 150 major buildings with several million square feet of space to search."

Regular classes aren't in session but several thousand students are summer classes at the school.

Flinchum said the man was reported near Dietrick Hall, a three-story dining facility. The dining hall is steps away from the dorm where the mass shootings took place in 2007.

The youths who phoned in the sighting described the man as white, 6 feet tall, wearing a blue-and-white shirt and gray shorts and brown sandals, police said. He was reported walking fast in the direction of the volleyball courts.??

The juveniles attending the Higher Achievement Program camp on campus are from the Washington, D.C., area. The national nonprofit organization sponsors academic programs for at-risk middle-school youth.

Police from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg and Christiansburg and Montgomery County sheriff's deputies were searching for the man.

"All state resources have been made available to assist Virginia Tech Police Department and local law enforcement in the search for this man who was allegedly sighted on campus with a firearm," Gov. Bob McDonnel's office said in a statement. "Of course, this report is a frightening reminder of the events that took place four years ago on the Tech campus."

"The first thought that went through my head was, oh no, not this again," Doug Fypla, doing maintenance work at Payne Hall, told The Roanoke Times. He said he decided to keep working, even after his supervisor told him of the alert.

University fined
The campus was the scene of the deadliest mass killing by a lone gunman in U.S. history ? the April 16, 2007, shooting spree by Seung-Hui Cho that killed 32 people and wounded 25 others before the gunman committed suicide.

Virginia Tech, which was criticized for not reacting quickly enough in that case, responded quickly this time.

After sending out an initial warning on the Web site, the school continued to update people on campus and the city of Blacksburg kept its citizens apprised of the situation through its own Web site.

Federal authorities fined the school in March after ruling that administrators violated campus safety law by waiting too long to notify staff and students about a potential threat after the first two students were shot to death in 2007, in West Ambler Johnston Hall, a dorm near the dining facility.

An email alert went out more than two hours later that day, about the time Cho was chaining shut the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more students and faculty and himself.

The school's alert system also was activated in 2008, when an exploded cartridge from a nail gun produced sounds similar to gunfire near a campus dormitory. It was the first time the system was activated after the 2007 massacre. After the shootings, Virginia Tech started using text messages and other methods besides emails to warn students of danger.

Carrying a gun on campus isn't necessarily illegal.

The Virginia attorney general's office says "a public university generally cannot prohibit open or concealed carry of a firearm on campus grounds," even though a university can ban openly carried guns in campus buildings or at specified events.

But the state attorney general has determined that public universities cannot bar gun owners with valid concealed carry permits from bringing firearms into campus buildings.

Reuters, The Associated Press and NBC's Pete Williams contributed to this report.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44018807/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/

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