![President Todd Pfannestiel poses with Jeremy Thurston chairperson Board of Trustees [left] and former chairperson Robert Brvenik [right] after accepting the university's institutional charter.](https://uticatangerine.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/unnamed.jpeg)
A school security guard was shot in the back of the head last month during a fight outside a Proctor High School football game. He was discharged from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital a few days later and the shooter was identified when he turned himself in to Utica Police the next day.
Proctor High School is an 11-minute drive from Utica University, but Vice President for Facilities and Emergency Management Shad Crowe said nothing goes on in Utica without Utica University Campus Safety knowing.
Campus Safety monitors local police channels 24/7, on the lookout for critical incidents happening in the Utica area. They share information with Utica University’s community depending on the location of the incident and the media attention the incident garners, even if it doesn’t directly impact the university.
They want the community to know that Campus Safety is monitoring everything, Crowe said.
“Communicating and being transparent helps people to not become alarmed,” Crowe said.
On Saturday, Sept. 9, Campus Safety sent out an alert to make students aware of the shooting incident and let the campus know that they are monitoring it.
Several students, including Rita Salibi, Keely Herrick, Jaedin Prudent and Lesly Illescas, did not receive an alert. Illescas said she found out about the incident in a conversation in her math class. One of her classmates went to the football game at which the incident occurred.
Most of Illescas’ classmates are from the Utica area and she was surprised to hear that “it’s normal, it always happens,” from them.
She would’ve wanted to receive a notification, “even if it’s 10 minutes, 15 minutes nearby, you never know what could happen.”
Herrick was alerted through her roommate, who did receive a notification about the incident.
Campus Safety’s sources in the police department said “there should be no concern for Utica University at this time.”
Members of the Campus Safety department are well acquainted and have contacts within local agencies “that usually can provide us with specifics regarding the incident,” Crowe said, sometimes including details that police departments can’t provide to the public.
Crowe believed there was no immediate danger to the campus, that the police department had a general idea of where the suspect was and that the suspect wasn’t a threat to the university’s campus community.
That did not mean Campus Safety wouldn’t be vigilant in their patrol operations, checking the perimeter of the university, checking doors in the academic buildings and residence halls, checking vehicles and making sure no one is trying to break into them and monitoring cameras, Crowe said.
Construction management student Chris Okeng’o said even though he doesn’t live on campus, he has noticed Campus Safety patrolling often.
“As an international student it’s nice to see that the school has good security,” Okeng’o said. “That I can see.”
Campus security are not the only safety officers on Utica’s campus. State police, New Hartford Police and Utica Police occasionally come through campus as they did that Saturday and Sunday as part of their patrolling duties, even though there was no reason to believe the suspect had fled in the university’s direction, Crowe said.
“I didn’t receive any phone calls [from faculty and staff],” Crowe said. “As long as we continue to do our best to share as much as we have when we have it, in a timely fashion, I think it helps people to remain calm.”
If the incident was closer or the suspect was not in custody and was sighted in the vicinity, “that’s a completely different conversation,” Crowe said.
