This morning, Long Beach City College had an incident at the Pacific Coast Campus involving a film professor with a prop gun.
A text message alert was sent to faculty and students alerting to take shelter to the nearest room and to lock all doors immediately.
Many students at PCC were shocked and confused to hear about there being a possible shooter on campus.
Brooke Davidoff, a student who was at PCC during the incident, described her reaction when the lockdown began.
“It was interesting, I’ve never had armed police officers walk into a classroom and tell us to shut the door before,” Davidoff said.
“We got text messages in our class not to leave, we got emails in our class not to leave and we were very happy to have a classroom without windows.”
Katie Zeoli, an anthropology professor at PCC, was very distressed about the scare on campus.
“I’m on edge. My nerves are wrecked. It feels like we just went through something traumatic … and it was a toy gun and it scared the crap out of me because I didn’t know how to protect them,” Zeoli said.
Sara Gerstman, who was also at PCC, was one of many students who felt shocked to hear that the possible suspect with a gun was on the same campus as she was.
“I was kind of shocked cause I hear stuff like that happening but I never really pictured it happening at my school,” Gerstman said.
“Then I was kind of calm because you now there are procedures to this and I was in a really small classroom so it would of been even harder for him to get in.”
Enrique Victor, who was in class during the lockdown and later heard about the incident expressed frustration at the idea that the situation was caused by someone not following procedure.
“I feel like at least if they’re going to be working on stuff like that they should at least let the whole campus know, they should at least put something out saying ‘Hey our class is going to be working on this, there’s going to be props and stuff like that,’” Victor said.
The professor was carrying the prop gun for his film class, and had forgotten about it while walking around campus.
Viking staff contributed: Nehemiah Balaoro, and Steven Matthews