Police Urge Vigilance After 3 Ivy League Schools Are Hit with Bomb Threats on the Same Day
Multiple Ivy League colleges were threatened Sunday that there were bombs on their campuses.
Cornell, Columbia and Brown universities all alerted students and evacuated some campus buildings in the aftermath of threats, according to NBC News.
All three colleges eventually ruled that their buildings were safe after several hours of searching for a bomb.
The threats followed a similar one against Yale two days earlier, which also prompted the evacuation of several nearby buildings in New Haven, Connecticut.
The New York City Police Department called the threat at Columbia “a swatting incident.”
The NYPD has determined that the threats @Columbia today were a swatting incident. Police conducted a search of the locations and deemed the area safe. The investigation into the origins of those messages remains ongoing. https://t.co/KImPbu3OqP
— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) November 7, 2021
Andy Costello, a former NYPD deputy inspector of police, said swatting can mean a fake threat to distract police from the actual scene of a crime, according to WCBS-TV.
“But it’s morphed into a term where people make fake bomb threats simultaneously at different locations, just to attract and move police resources to them,” Costello said.
Columbia students Cole Fitzgibbons and Christian Gomes were alarmed when their college sent out a warning.
“At that point, we just took our stuff and we just dipped,” Fitzgibbons said, according to WCBS.
Gomes said it was odd that multiple colleges had the same experience.
“And it happened at Yale a couple days ago. I don’t know if it’s like targeting the Ivys,” Gomes said.
Cornell officials said the threat came via anonymous phone call, according to The Cornell Daily Sun.
Joel Malina, vice president for university relations at Cornell, said the caller threatened an attack with automatic weapons and explosives.
BREAKING: Multiple campus buildings were evacuated due to a bomb threat Sunday afternoon. Columbia, Yale and Cornell also experienced bomb threats over the weekend.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.https://t.co/RASAz9U4dj
— Brown Daily Herald (@the_herald) November 7, 2021
In all cases, the threats targeted specific buildings.
Similar threats also took place last week at three schools in Ohio: Miami University, Ohio University’s Athens campus and Cleveland State’s Marshall College of Law.
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