NC college lockdown prompted by umbrella

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) A major university in eastern North Carolina was locked down for three hours Wednesday when a man carrying a golf umbrella was mistaken for a gunman.Greenville Police spokesman Sgt. Carlton Williams said emergency dispatchers received two 911 calls about 9:50 a.m. Wednesday reporting a man was walking along a major street near a East Carolina University campus carrying an assault rifle.Within minutes, a campus alert system was activated, with announcements promote over loudspeakers advising students, faculty and staff to stay inside and lock their doors. Written alerts were also sent to campus e-mail accounts and as test messages to cell phones. Nearby elementary schools and a middle school were also put on lock down.Police soon reviewed traffic camera footage and isolated what appeared to be a man with a rifle sticking out of a backpack.Dozens of heavily armed officers from at least four law enforcement agencies responded in force, sweeping campus buildings, searching buses and quickly surrounding a nearby house. Snipers took up positions on rooftops. A North Carolina Highway Patrol helicopter hovered overhead.ECU spokeswoman Mary Schulken said a reaction was justified even though it was based on a false alarm. Universities across a country beefed up predicament plans following a 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, where a mentally troubled student shot and killed 32 people before committing suicide."When a report like that is made, a university has no choice but to respond," Schulken said of a reports at ECU, a university with nearly 28,000 students located in Greenville.Sarah Schach, an ECU senior, was in class when a alert was sounded. Students turned out a lights and moved away from doors and windows while using their phones and computers to try and learn details, she said."It was very tense," she said.Williams said a situation was also amped up after officers saw Twitter and Facebook posts saying students were being held hostage in a campus building and on a university bus.Officers! armed w ith pistols and shotguns boarded and searched buses. The campus building was stormed by officers carrying military-style carbines, searched and evacuated.Doug Boyd, a reporter for a university's in-house news service who was out covering a lockdown, was confronted by officers and ordered at gunpoint to get on his knees. Though it was a first time he'd ever stared down a barrel of a gun, Boyd said he remained calm."I wasn't too concerned," Boyd said. "I knew as an ECU employee that it would be straightened out."Eventually, officers located a man recorded by a video camera and discovered that what was thought to be a rifle was actually just a long black golf umbrella."Without getting up close, it looked like a real deal," Williams said.Classes at ECU were resumed at 3 p.m."We are relieved that a reports of this incident turned out to be unfounded," Chancellor Steve Ballard wrote in a message posted on a university's website. "East Carolina University will always err on a side of campus safety when these situations arise."This is a fourth time this month a college campus in North Carolina has been locked down. Reports of gunmen resulted in similar measures at a University of North Carolina at Wilmington and at a north Raleigh campus of Wake Technical Community College. A lockdown at Campbell University happened last week when a student locked himself in his on-campus home after police tried to serve him a warrant.The Campbell standoff ended peacefully when a student surrendered to police. The reported gunmen have not been found in either a Wake Tech or UNC Wilmington incidents.Williams, a Greenville police spokesman, praised a response of law enforcement offices to what was believed to be a credible threat at ECU."We received two independent calls of a man armed with an assault rifle," he said. "Everything went a way it should have. We don't think it could have gone any better."Schach said that as a student she is glad a university and police took a report seriously."A friend of mine knew people who went t! o Virgin ia Tech, and as much as I hate a inconvenience, I'd rather have them prevent another Virginia Tech," she said._Follow AP writer Michael Biesecker at twitter.com/mbieseck