A group of OU students, including Ryan Whitaker, Adoniah Colbert, Katrina Parker and Tonye Harcout, were playing volleyball outside of the Couch Center when they got OU’s alert at 9:25 p.m. of a reported active shooter on campus.
Immediately, the group rushed from the sand volleyball courts to the Henderson-Tolson Cultural Center to hide upstairs. Harcourt, an OU computer science sophomore, and his friends said it might not have been the safest place in the world, but it was the best they could find as the room they hid in had no windows.
“It kind of just felt like every man for himself,” Whitaker, a marketing and finance junior, said. “ … After getting the text, because it was like, ‘run, hide or fight,’ or something like that. It's almost like basically fend for yourself in a weird way.”
Whitaker said the group didn’t know if they were in a safe area, leaving them wondering if the potential shooter could find them.
While hiding and waiting for the all clear, the group noticed several inconsistencies in reporting from several news outlets and sources online. The group didn’t know what to expect or what was going on.
“What frustrates me, I feel like, is the lack of information,” Parker, a psychology junior, said. “They could have communicated better instead of just leaving us hanging.”
The initial OU-Norman alert pinged the community at 9:25 p.m. followed by an additional alert 20 minutes later saying law enforcement was investigating possible shots fired on OU’s South Oval.
Immediately, law enforcement agencies from Noble, Oklahoma City and Moore as well as state park rangers, Oklahoma Highway Patrol and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives joined OU Police Department and Norman Police Department at OU’s Norman campus, according to OU Daily reporters on scene.
Here’s the scene on Boyd St. right now. Follow this article for live updates: @OUDaily https://t.co/PaixXgazeI pic.twitter.com/b2960ab9fE
— alexia (@alexiaaston) April 8, 2023
OU authorities issued an all clear nearly an hour and a half later at 10:53 p.m. with no reports of injuries.
For Candice Hrencecin, OU meteorology senior, was in her apartment at Millenium on East Lindsey Street when she received OU’s alert.
Already off campus, Hrencecin started texting her friends and loved ones to find out if they were safe and away from campus and Campus Corner.
“It was just so surreal,” Hrencecin said. “I can't really put words to describe how shocked I was at getting that message. And then just how terrifying it was just to be waiting for more information.”
Regardless of what happened tonight, it was traumatizing. I never want to live through that again.
— Candice Hrencecin (@hrencecin) April 8, 2023
Hrencecin said information from OU’s alerts kept her up to date, but she still listened to the police scanners and local news to hear more updates from the situation going on just down the street from her apartment.
Hrencecin said the moment she heard that campus was all clear was the most relief she had felt in a while.
Thomas Pablo, an OU Daily staffer and journalism freshman, was walking to a friend’s birthday party and stopped by Couch Center to pick up a gift when he received OU’s alert, saying the text made his stomach drop.
Pablo said he and his friends paced inside Couch Center while waiting for more information from OU alerts and listened to the police scanner, hearing conflicting reports from news outlets and the scanner.
Pablo said with the misinformation surrounding potential suspects on the police scanner as well as mixed reporting, his state of shock from the alert shifted to fear of a potential mass shooting.
Hrencecin said the biggest thing she’s taken away from Friday night was the need for active lawmakers and policies to restrict gun access across the country.
Hours before OU sent the alert Friday, six people were injured in a shooting at a beach in Isle of Palms, South Carolina. On March 27, a shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville resulted in the deaths of six people, including three children.
The Oklahoma House advanced House Bill 2139 on March 21 which would decrease the requirements needed for teachers to carry on Oklahoma Public School grounds. This session, over 100 bills in the Oklahoma legislature were introduced to increase access to firearms.
“I'm really tired of lawmakers sitting and doing nothing or just being all talk and not implementing any policy to do anything to fix this,” Hrencecin said. “ … It's so frustrating to constantly live in this loop because people are traumatized and they're deeply affected by these kinds of events.”
This story was edited by Alexia Aston and Jazz Wolfe.
