Western Michigan University students say they’re disappointed by the university’s lack of response to the Kalamazoo mass shooting. On Saturday night, Jason Brian Dalton of Kalamazoo opened fire at three locations in the area - a townhome, a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Texas Township, and the Seeyle Kia.
Many students are signed up to receive automatic alerts about emergencies on campus, but no such alert came. WMU senior Roger Brown says he was surprised by this because students were quickly notified about Wednesday’s robbery on campus.
“We were notified about the robbery - when they abbreviated ‘two black men’ as ‘2BM’ - right after it happened. But soon as the shooting occurred we were not notified. That really scares me and it really shows how WMU responses to things such as this,” says Brown.
“The first person to contact me was a friend of mine from Oregon. He sent me a message saying, ‘Are you safe?’ I didn’t know what he was talking about,” says Western PhD student Daniel Mengistu.
WMU sophomore Zachary Wilson lives close to the Seeyle Kia where one of the shootings occurred. He says he heard about the shooting from his sister in Grand Rapids. He says he understands why the university did not have that information immediately, but students still should have been informed.
"They still should have sent out an alert at sometime of the day," says Wilson.
University President John Dunn says Western will be exploring ways to better alert students about emergencies in the area.
“I think we failed in having adequate communication to the university campus,” says Dunn.
Dunn says the Clery Act requires Western to let students, faculty, and staff know about an imminent danger to the university - but that danger was not clear to WMU Public Safety at the time. Kalamazoo College students, however, were warned about the shooting shortly after midnight.
Western will hold a campus-wide forum to address this issue Monday night at 7 p.m. at WMU’s Bernhard Center.