BATON ROUGE, LA (WAFB) -
LSU authorities are
holding back details as to what led them to evacuate the entire campus after
Monday's bomb threat. Even though the campus is "all clear," there are still
many questions that are looming.
Authorities investigating
the bomb threat at LSU are now focusing on finding out who made the call. When some 35,000 students, faculty and staff
were told to evacuate from campus, the buildings were quickly cleared, and no
one was injured. It was traffic that became a major problem.
"We've got to go to
school, and try to see what we can do to move people off campus faster. But we
ask people to be patient. They were, they got off campus and, the most
important thing is, they got out of the building," said Herb Vincent, Associate
Vice Chancellor.
While university officials
look at the parts of their evacuation plant that could be improved on, LSU
Police Captain Corey LaLonde says the next step for his office is finding and
charging whoever called in the bomb threat.
The threat came in the
wake of bomb scares at several other large universities around the nation last
week.
"All of those
possibilities are being looked at, but I can't say at this time whether or not
that any connection has been made positively or negatively," said LaLonde. Law
enforcement officers searched the campus for nearly 12 hours. The evacuation
was lifted Monday evening.
Monday wasn't the first
time LSU has dealt with a potential security threat. In 2010, someone parked a
suspicious car in the middle of the quad. LSUPD investigated and classes went
on as normal. Two years later, Associate Vice Chancellor Herb Vincent says this
event was different.
"Why this bomb threat was acted upon would go
to the content of that phone call, which I can't comment on. It's part of the
on-going investigation," said Vincent.
Both Captain LaLonde and Vice Chancellor Herb
Vincent say they received calls from concerned parents Monday. They ask that
parents remind their kids to pay attention to emergency alerts and keep their
parents in the loop during emergency situations.
LSU
officials communicated with counterparts in Texas, North Dakota and
Ohio, where similar threats were called in Friday.
There has been no word whether the phone call related
to LSU was connected to the others.
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