A drunken man was arrested in the Quillen residential dorm on Sunday, March 31, just after midnight. Campus security and Elizabethton police were on the scene.
Campus security received a call just after midnight that a man had been running around Webb Hall erratically, shouting that someone was trying to shoot him, and then he ran into Quillen. Security responded almost immediately and located the man who was hiding in a bathroom in one of the suites.
Security was in the process of locking the dormitories for the end of open dorms; the intruder entered in the middle of this process.
Security assessed the situation and determined that the intruder was under the influence. So, they phoned the police and stayed outside the bathroom, keeping the man contained until the authorities arrived. Police concurred that the man was under the influence and proceeded to arrest him under intoxication charges.
The man was hiding in an occupied suite of Quillen which usually has five students sharing a suite. In this case, no one was in the room when he got in. Junior Griffin Leonard was one of the occupants that was returning to the suite when the arrest was being made.
“I was shocked when I got to the dorm,” Leonard said. “The guy didn’t touch anything while he was in there; my friend’s wallet was sitting out in the open, and he didn’t even take that! I waited out in the lobby until the police had brought the guy out and took him away before I went back into my room.”
Even with the incident taking place, Brent Nipper, Director of Property & Risk Management, was very pleased with the responses of security and students alike in this situation.
“You don’t want things like this to happen, obviously,” Nipper said. “The encouraging thing about this is that everything went the way it should have gone. Someone saw what was going on and reported it, and security responded promptly and kept the situation contained before the authorities arrived.”
Unbeknownst to many students, campus security does more than lock up at night and patrol during the day.
“The situation had been reported to the RD on call who then called security, informed them of the situation, and then asked if there was anything that he could do to help,” Nipper explained. “Campus Security is really a collaborative effort of a lot of different people. The situation at hand went up the chain as it should, and there weren’t any complications as a result.”
Although this incident happened just after open dorms ended when the dorms were still unlocked, this will not affect open-dorm policies.
“In my time with Campus Security, I can’t remember a time like this,” Nipper said. “We’ve had reports of suspicious people before; sometimes they turn out to be people who are actually supposed to be here. Sometimes they are just people. We don’t have any plans to change anything at this time.”