EDWARDSVILLE Ill.
In line on her college campus to donate blood, Angela Negron
was unsure which was more surprising: That the school’s police happened upon a
fellow student’s cryptic note allegedly threatening mayhem rivaling April’s
massacre at Virginia Tech, or that she had to learn of the threat from a
reporter not the school five days after it surfaced.
Either way, the 18-year-old nursing student at Southern
Illinois University in this St. Louis
suburb wasn’t overly put off by either.
“I feel safe here,” she said this week, a day
after 22-year-old student Olutosin Oduwole was charged with attempting to make
a terrorist threat in the note police say was found in his disabled car on
campus July 20.
Police say that note crawled on a sheet of paper that included
rap lyrics made no direct reference to targeting SIU’s campus, and that they
believed no attack was imminent. But Negron said a campus-wide notification
about the threat would have been appreciated.
Southern Illinois, however, has no
immediate, universal way of warning the campus when such danger is near or
possible.
The current notification system deals with getting the word
out by radio, television and the university’s automated telephone system and
staff voicemail when wintry weather forces classes there to be canceled,
spokesman Greg Conroy said. When severe storms are closing in, a campus
loudspeaker also tells folks through a recorded message to take cover.
