Threats, idle…
Story time…
So, I’m in my office set to work another disjointed night because pandemic time is meaningless. The university is mostly empty. Probably fewer than 50 people scattered around both campuses.
Ironically, one of those people is the guy in the office next to mine. The rest of the building sits vacant. Just finding my grading groove, I hear him head out for the night and barely acknowledge it until the siren starts moaning. I cycle through my list. Too low for a police car. Too slow for a fire truck. Too insistent for an ambulance. For a moment, I’m back in the Midwest iand preparing for a tornado.
Then the voice starts. I can’t quite make out the words, so I open my door and find my neighbor leaning against the railing outside, trying to figure it out too.
“…This is not a test. There is an emergency situation on campus. Again, this is not a test…”
The rest is a blur. Evacuate immediately. Don’t use electronic devices. Get at least 400 feet from buildings. Leave if you can.
I pack my bag immediately and bounce, walking to the lot with my neighbor. We exchange stay safes and hop in our cars, neither of us sure of the reason for doing so.
On my way home, I start checking the socials. Nothing at first. A half hour later an email alert arrives…bomb threat. I update Twitter, already home because I live just a couple miles away. Then I hug my kids, knowing equally that nothing will likely come of the threat and that it still has to be taken seriously because, well, this is America.
As I sit on the couch—mourning the lost night of work and thinking of my few students sheltering in place because they have to live in campus housing—a story from my own college days floats back on an associative cloud.
A note here: I teach at my alma mater, so this connection will seem fairly obvious. At the same time—and contrary to what my students will tell you—I don’t spend my days thinking about the things I was doing in the spring of 1996, even the weirdest ones.
And yet…
It’s 2:30 on a Thursday morning. I’m skateboarding across campus on a cool Southern California night after a long night of laying out the news section of the student newspaper. Cutting through the center of the university, I’m just about to the main lot and can see my apartment beyond it when I notice the Campus Safety cruiser parked against the curb. A woman—in some ways obviously not a student—sits near the car’s front bumper.
As I reach them, two things become apparent: she’s drunk—like the old-timey drunk we used to call blotto—and the two student officers talking to her aren’t sure how to handle the situation. At the same time, a squad car from the local PD pulls up on the other side of her and she gets agitated immediately.
“Wait. Wait!” She says the word loud, like a shield, and looks from Campus Safety to the cop getting out of the car and then catches sight of me from the corner of her eye. Turning back to the campus officers she point at me.
“Hold on, that’s my brother-in-law. I’m here to see him. Tell them. Tell them I’m here to see you.”
One of the officers, Dave, looks at me and shrugs, as if to say, Well??? We know each other. Since freshman year. He let me into one of the buildings on campus to propose to my future wife that January. I shake my head.
“Naw, I don’t know her.”
The woman stands abruptly and shouts, “Stop lying! Why are you lying?”
She’s cuffed and in the back seat a few moments later and I feel bad for her. She’s so blasted she likely doesn’t really know where she is. Might even believe I’m family. But I’m exhausted and figure she’ll sleep it off in a cell. Probably get cut loose in the morning (I have reasons for thinking the system will do her that courtesy).
A few nights later, I get a call from one of the younger staff members on the paper staff. There’s been a bomb threat and a dorm on campus is being evacuated. Ever the sensitive one, I bypass the Are you alright? and tell him to grab a pad and cover it.
The call turns out bogus. No bomb or credible threat in LEO-speak. Just a bunch of college students standing around in their pajamas in the middle of the night until it’s just a minor anecdote in their college memories, if that.
I track the story with the police and find out a bit more a few days later. The call came from a pay phone outside a local dive called The Wheel about two miles from campus. If you’re from SoCal, you know the type of place. Red brick exterior, wagon wheel-shaped neon sign, an aesthetic we’d call Colonizercore in current parlance.
A woman made the call. Said people at the school treated her bad. The bomb was because of that.
This info is given to me off the record. I ask if they think it’s connected to my “sister-in-law.” They say they’ll look into it, but they likely won’t find the person. Probably a crank call. Low-priority. And that’s just how it turned out. I honestly don’t know if they ever caught anyone or if that woman had anything to do with the call.
And that’s it. Life moves on and I can’t say I feel unsafe as it does. I certainly don’t think much about it all beyond a few fleeting plans for going to The Wheel to ask around.
But I was busy and the paper was just one of three jobs I was working outside my course load. Within a couple weeks, it’s back-burnered so far it slips into the murk of my subconscious and only resurfaces when the PA siren jolts me into remembrance.
And yet…
Something’s different this time, even as the outcome is basically the same. After evacuating all nine of our campuses and searching the two I work on, the all-clear is given. No bombs found (plural because the threat is specific enough to say there are multiple devices but vague enough to make their supposed locations uncertain).
Then an email at 10:33 pm—just under six hours since the evacuation order—with the sentence “Business may resume as normal.”
Somehow, I don’t feel the same sense of moving on from this, mostly because I don’t have much of a theory for why this happened. There’s almost no one here. Student athletes in some sports. The few professors who don’t have the bandwidth at home to run their classes online. The skeleton staff keeping the place running.
So why a specific bomb threat? I have speculations I won’t get into, not because they’re wild conspiracies, but because they’re baseless, even more tenuous than thinking the woman on the curb that night cared enough to call in a threat.
I hope we do find out, if for no other reason than to head off people spinning out false narratives and finding more fear in the spinning.