Virginia Tech, the site of a 2007 shooting that left 33 dead, compared with a scare on Thursday as officials ordered a shutdown of the campus after three young men said they saw a man with what he believes is a concealed firearm by a cloth.
Alerts were issued. Classes were canceled. Students were urged to stay indoors. And for more than five hours, police from several law enforcement agencies scoured the campus, although the release of a sketch in their search for the gunman said.
No man was discovered. However, school officials and police were satisfied with the first big test of security measures of the university renewed.
"Each of our warning systems worked smoothly," said Larry Hincker, university spokesman.
That was not the case on April 16, 2007, when the university was criticized for waiting two hours after the first shots were fired to issue a campus-wide alert. Two students died in a dormitory just after 7 am, and a campus-wide alert was sent by e-mail shortly before 9:30. Less than half an hour later, 30 people were killed in an engineering building by the same gunman, Cho Seung-hui, who then committed suicide.
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