PITTSBURGH ― A 20-year-old off-campus student has been jailed on charges that he posted a social media threat to shoot people at a popular gathering area on Penn State’s main campus.
Jong Seong Shim, of Tinton Falls, New Jersey, told police on the campus about 140 miles east of Pittsburgh that his post on the social media site Yik Yak was a “prank,” according to a criminal complaint filed Monday by campus police.
But Police Chief Tyrone Parham said in a statement that, “Alarming an entire community is not considered a joke.”
The sophomore engineering student was jailed after he was unable to immediately post $100,000 bond following his arraignment on two counts of making terroristic threats and one count of disorderly conduct. He faces a preliminary hearing Oct. 22 before a district judge at the Centre County Courthouse in Bellefonte, according to online court records, which do not list a defense attorney for him.
The message was posted about 10:30 p.m. Saturday threatening to shoot people at the HUB, a center of campus social life that includes various eateries and other places students meet to socialize. Several students alerted campus police when they saw the post.
Yik Yak is a social media service that enables users to post anonymous comments that are deleted a short time later, and visible only to those within 1.5 miles of the poster, university police said.
Police took the threat seriously since it targeted the HUD, where there likely would be large numbers of people. Police had planned to have additional officers on patrol before they were able to trace the post to a mobile device used by Shim.
