Just hours after two graduate students at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge were shot to death in a campus apartment building one night last week, campus officials used their new emergency-alert system to send a text message to about 8,400 students who had signed up for the service. But because of a technical glitch, some of those messages never arrived.
“Some folks who are part of that system did not receive a notification by that particular means,” said Sean O’Keefe, the university’s chancellor, at a news conference Friday morning, which was Webcast. “We notified and consulted with the provider of that particular service at about 2 o’clock this morning. ... There are some technical challenges that they obviously encountered.”
Mr. O’Keefe said officials did not know how many registered users failed to receive the message. But he stressed that the university also sent an e-mail notification to everyone with a campus e-mail address, as well as a voice-mail message to those who had opted for that, and that those systems worked flawlessly. Officials went door to door notifying residents of the apartment complex where the shootings had taken place, which was reserved for graduate and married students.
In a statement issued on Saturday, officials said that they have investigated the problem and fixed the glitch. A full-scale test of the system is planned for January 18, the week when classes resume after the holiday break, the statement added.
It was the first murder on the campus since the 1990s, officials said. Two male doctoral students, Chandrasekhar Reddy Komma and Kiran Kumar Allam, were found shot in the head, one of them bound. Mr. O’Keefe said officials had decided not to lock down the campus because they felt that the shootings were an isolated incident. The bodies were discovered by Mr. Allam’s pregnant wife, Swapna. Police are reportedly searching for three suspects.
Stuart Watkins, a sophomore who is a member of LSU’s undergraduate student government, said in an interview that he never received the emergency text message, even though he had signed up for the service. “I haven’t spoken to anyone who did receive the text message,” he said, noting that he had been asking around.
“They did a big thing trying to get as many students as they could to sign up for it” when the service was introduced in the spring, said Mr. Watkins. “This is a safety precaution that LSU was taking, and it didn’t work.” Mr. Watkins said he heard about the shootings from a friend, and then from the e-mail message sent by campus administrators.
Brian Nichols, chief information-technology-security and policy officer for the university, declined to answer questions about the emergency-alert service, referring a reporter to the university’s public-relations office.
Public-relations officials declined to elaborate, although they did provide a copy of two text messages that were sent through the emergency service. The first message, titled “Shooting,” read: “PD notified of shooting @ Ed Gay Apts. 2 M victims-Police on scene/No suspects at this time. Please use caution.” The second, sent about three hours later, said “LSUPD has secured the scene. Check www.lsu.edu for further information.”
An announcement on the university’s Web site notes that the emergency-alert service is provided by ClearTXT.
Doug Kaufman, CEO of ClearTXT, said in an e-mail interview late Sunday that the problem occurred because of “a misunderstanding between LSU and clearTXT about how enrollment data was to be collected from subscribers” via the campus’s Web directory.
“We have worked together to clarify how enrollment data is to be collected and the situation has been resolved,” he said.
The tragic shootings at Virginia Tech in April prompted many colleges around the country to install systems that allow messages to be sent to students, professors, and staff members in the event of an emergency. Martin Ringle, chief technology officer at Reed College, estimates that about 25 percent to 30 percent of colleges are at least working toward setting up such systems.
At Reed, officials are installing and testing a service called Connect-ED, by The NTI Group.
“We’ve been testing as we go to make sure that we know who is being reached and to make sure that the people are fully trained in its use,” Mr. Ringle said. Though he said he did not know the details of what happened at Louisiana State, the incident underlines the need for such drills and training. “So many people in higher education believe that when you throw technology at a problem, it’s going to be fixed,” he said. “And they fail to realize just how complex the use of a technology has become.”
At Louisiana State, officials said they plan to redouble their efforts to encourage those on campus to sign up for the notification system. “This system was introduced seven months ago and only a quarter of the LSU population signed up for it,” Mr. O’Keefe said in a statement.
