By Gal Tziperman Lotan and Caitlin Doornbos
Orlando Sentinel
ORLANDO — A day after a University of Central Florida library was evacuated because of reports of a “Middle Eastern” gunwoman, university police defended their response.
UCF Police Department Chief Richard Beary said Wednesday that he was “sorry” the alert offended people, but that he had been criticized in the past for not giving out suspect descriptions.
“Our emergency dispatchers put that information out as best they could to make sure that we could notify the community to stay clear of that area, and what suspicious people to be on the lookout for,” Beary said. “And again, while that may have been offensive, it was not intended that way.”
Campus police saw a social media post describing a woman with a gun in the John C. Hitt Library at about 2:45 p.m., and got 911 calls about a possible armed person soon after. A 911 caller reported her friend saw a girl acting “panicky” with a “silver and black handheld object” that she thought was a gun in the library’s main stairwell between the third and fourth floors.
Officials evacuated the library and sent students an alert about a “possible Middle Eastern gun man/woman.”
The 911 caller described the woman with the object as “wearing full Muslim – like a burka, hijab.”
“She looked like really like panicky and kinda like shaky and she went to the corner of the stairwell and started falling to her knees,” a 911 caller told dispatch.
About 10 other people called in to report seeing texts or Facebook posts warning students about someone with a gun inside the library.
Police on Wednesday released a redacted version of a post on GroupMe, a messaging app.
“I didn’t see the gun but [redacted name] said she’s 90% sure that’s what she had in her hands and the girl was like Muslim and in a corner like freaking out,” a student wrote.
No gunman or woman was ever found, and nobody was injured.
The Florida branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations issued a statement Wednesday calling the emergency alert “xenophobic.”
(UCF PD Image)
“An insensitive alert like this leads to backlash and unravels the positive efforts these students are attempting to implement,” said Rasha Mubarak, the organization’s Orlando regional coordinator.
Beary disagreed.
“This is the new reality we’re all trying to get our arms around, is how we deal with social media threats,” he said.
Throughout the search Tuesday, hundreds of students remained on the library’s lawn watching officers. Beary said some have criticized the department for not keeping people any distance away from the library as they investigated the report.
Beary said he chose to put all his resources inside the 226,000-square-foot building to search for a possible gun-wielder.
“At the end of the day, our response was not perfect, but we are going to continue to do better,” Beary said.
Police are also investigating what caused an officer’s AR-15 to discharge as he was putting it away in a gun rack in his car.
The bullet went through the roof of the officer’s car and did not injure anyone.
Beary did not identify the officer, but said he has been with the department for more than 30 years. The officer will remain on active duty while department officials investigate why the gun went off.
Copyright 2016 The Orlando Sentinel