ETTRICK, Va. -- Four people were hurt in a shooting at Virginia State University. Police have identified multiple suspects and charges were pending. Officers responded to the shooting at about 12:30 a.m. Wednesday.
University spokesperson Gwen Williams Dandridge answered reporter questions Wednesday morning about 10 hours after the shooting. You can watch the entire in the video box above, or read the following quotes below:
Are the injured or the suspect Virginia State University students?
"None of the injured students or the suspects are enrolled in Virginia State University for Fall of 2024. We do not have that they were enrolled for our summer program. And again, as we just look at the current list of students who are enrolled there, they are not currently enrolled at Virginia State University."
"You mean like, you mean previous or were they previous students? We have not got that information. I'm not certain that that we have that information. We just we've looked at because again, when all of this happened overnight, and we wanted to check immediately to see if any of it involved our students, none of the the names match any of the names that are currently enrolled here at Virginia State."
Are there students on campus right now?
"The students who are on campus now are freshmen. They're our first time students. Our returning students should not be on campus at this time. They don't come back to campus until later this week. This is Welcome Week for our freshmen."
"I can tell you that there was not an event happening on campus at [the time of the shooting], and so those students should not have been on our campus at that time."
"There had been a welcome event earlier in the evening. That event had ended and had been over for a couple of hours before this event. And it was not in the same place where this incident happened. It was on the lawn in front of Virginia Hall."
If there is security, how do non-students get on campus?
"That security gate is manned 24 hours a day. So yes, there was security at that gate. And as all of you saw when you tried to get onto campus, you had to stop at that gate to get onto campus, but there are pedestrian entrances that you can also use to get onto the campus."
"As you know, we are a very secure campus. You could tell that based on how quickly arrests were made in this case. And as I said, I cannot speak to the particulars, but you can tell that there was a very strong police presence, because arrests were made immediately there on the scene. And so again, we will just continue to re evaluate, as we always do, because our objective, of course, is always to keep our campus and our students and our Trojan community safe."
"We've always had good security on campus, and we were very pleased with how our security mans our campus. And so for today, there is nothing additional that we're doing, because there's no longer a threat to our campus as it relates to this incident. The suspects connected to this have been arrested and charges are pending. And again, it was a very quick arrest thanks to the hard work of our VSU Police Department, as well as the combined area police who were there, and the event that was held earlier in the evening had security there. And again, just want to reiterate that that event had ended several hours before this happened."
"I'm trying to think if any if I or any of you, can think of any university in the country that is totally restricted to only the people who work there and go there. I can't think of any university in the country that does that. And so I'm not certain that there would be a way for us to say your parents can't come on campus to visit you, or that [the media] could not be here on campus right now because our campus is restricted to only employees and students. So I understand the genesis of your question. I'm just not sure that it is anything that could be implementable, even legally."
What message do you have for parents?
"We understand how important the safety and security of a campus is to parents, and so we want to reiterate to all of the parents of our Trojans that we take this very seriously, and we will continue to re evaluate if there's anything that we can do differently, but we are very confident that Virginia State University is a safe campus."
"This is so early, and this just happened overnight, and they're all new to campus, so you know, it is unfortunate that this happened as a part of their first week experience, but again, we work really hard to make this Welcome Week and their entire four years here at Virginia State University memorable years for them. And so we are certainly hopeful that this does not impact anything as it relates to how they feel about being Trojans. We believe that this was an isolated incident, and our campus is a very safe place for our students."
How does Virginia State alert the campus to emergencies?
"RAVE Alerts get sent to all of our faculty, staff and students via their VSU email. In order for students to get RAVE Alerts, they have to have signed up for them, so that they can be sent to their individual cell phones. Any student can sign up to have as many as, I believe it's six phone numbers or email addresses added to their account so that they can put their parents or whomever they would like to add to also get those RAVE Alerts."
"Campus was put on lockdown when it first happened. I think our first RAVE Alert. I don't have my phone now to check my rave alerts, but the first rave alert went out shortly after police were on scene and realized that there was an incident happening, and the campus was taken off of lockdown... I believe... just around 4:30 a.m. when, when we deemed that all of the suspects had been apprehended and that there was no longer a threat to our campus community."
"The goal of the RAVE Alert, obviously, is to reach our students immediately in case of an emergency, and that's why they cannot opt out of being contacted via email, because obviously we own the VSU email account, but we encourage all students to opt into also getting those messages to their cell phone, because we know that their cell phone is always on their person. But we we have not traditionally shared those RAVE Alerts via social media. But again, that's something that we we would consider."
This is a developing story. Email the CBS 6 Newsroom if you have additional information to share.
