School shootings have become a drastic issue in the U.S., occurring in states all across the nation. Unfortunately, The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill was added to the ever-growing list of schools on Aug 28, 2023, when one of their professors was shot on campus.
At around 1:00 p.m. that Monday afternoon, the university was informed of gunshot sounds at Caudill Labs leading them to immediately send out an alert to all students and faculty warning them of an armed and dangerous person on campus. The school was put on lockdown for approximately three hours until an all-clear was sent out at 4:14 p.m. It was later announced that Tailei Qi, a graduate student at UNC, allegedly murdered his professor, Zijie Yan. Qi was arrested that same day and has since been charged with first-degree murder and possession of a firearm on educational property. He is being held without bail and, if convicted, faces life in prison.
“Campus should be a place of learning and safety, and it is truly unsettling to think that such a frightening incident can occur on our own grounds. The fact that the alleged shooter was a fellow student only amplifies the sense of unease,” Hayden Raffield, junior, said.
UNC’s school newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, printed an image showing texts sent to and from students during the lockdown in response to the shooting. The texts included messages like “Are you okay?”, “What is happening?”, “Are you safe?”, and “I’m so scared.” The moving image was meant to tell a story and represent the terror that rippled through the community.
“I think that the texts we have chosen and the texts that we have made the front cover of our paper today, tell a story of a community that is scared, and I think we communicate that scaredness in a lot of different ways. For some people, it was expletives, for some people, it was just an outpour of love and just checking in. But I think we told a story of a community that was startled, of a community that was scarred, and a community that is angry, and a community that is grieving,” Caitlyn Yaede, the paper’s Student Print Managing Editor, said in an interview with CNN.
Since the shooting, some students have criticized the school’s response to the active shooter threat. Many are saying that the teachers were unprepared, and the lack of information caused a mass panic. People across the campus did not know what was happening and were left wondering for hours if the shooter was still at large. Some students explained that they were evacuated before the all-clear message was sent out and were left not knowing where to go. Micah Baldonado, a student at UNC, has started a petition demanding immediate improvements to the school’s active shooter response protocol, and it has already gathered hundreds of signatures. The petition requests locks on all classroom doors, faculty emergency training, and changes to the alert system, as he argues it was too vague and only led to misinformation being spread.
“We were all pretty much out in the open to be shot. That is how it felt because we did not have any security or information,” Baldonado said.
This recent threat at UNC has gained national attention, exposing the need for updated active threat response plans at schools around the country. Etowah High School, along with the rest of the nation, mourns the innocent lives lost and is keeping Zijie Yan’s family in mind as they recover from this tragedy.
