Four crimes deemed "stories" in campus safety report
Four crimes reported over the last several weeks didn't actually occur, according to Vice President for Student Affairs Dennis Pruitt in a campus safety report for parents and students distributed during Parents Weekend.
“After thorough investigation by the USC and Columbia police departments, we have discovered that there was no robbery on the Horseshoe,” Pruitt wrote. “There was no gunman behind the Russell House. There was no assault on the train tracks behind Greek Village. There was no robbery at Main and Whaley streets.”
The reported gunman by Russell House and reported armed robbery at Main and Whaley streets prompted the first two Carolina Alerts of the semester. Both alerts were later updated to say authorities had searched the area but could not locate suspects in either case.
“It’s important to note that many of these stories are just that: stories,” Pruitt wrote.
The campus safety brochure was distributed with the university’s Guide to Parents Weekend when registered families checked-in Friday and Saturday. Students were notified via email Sunday night in a weekly message from the university’s communications staff.
“Recently, some UofSC parents and students have expressed concern about a perceived increase in campus and area crime,” the email to students read. “Also, there’s been a great deal of misinformation spread by social media outlets that thrive on sensationalism and mistruths.”
As for families absent from Parents Weekend festivities, Chief Communications Officer Wes Hickman said the university was still working to notify everyone. He said the expectation was that parents would share the information with their students during parents weekend.
Much of the decision of how and when to distribute the information to parents and students had to do with timing, Hickman said, since students open Sunday night emails in “great rates,” and Monday morning emails to faculty and staff yield “good open rates.” And the almost 10,000 people registered for Parents Weekend presented the university with “a great opportunity to get a head start on things,” he said. Furthermore, Hickman said the university didn’t want to send out the information “while students [were] distracted with other things like Parents Weekend and football.”
Hickman said though he could not say the investigations had ended, there was enough information for the university to publicly announce the reports were untrue.
“The investigations of each of those have been ongoing for some time, and they’ve been leading toward that conclusion,” Hickman said. “However, we weren’t able to confirm that until last week in each of those cases.”
Pruitt wrote that authorities responded to each incident’s report with “speed, intensity and concern for our students,” but in the end, those four incidents were “stories.”
“Not all of them have the same set of facts,” Hickman said. “The wording that was chosen was done to best describe what are four unrelated and distinguished situations.”
Though the aforementioned offenses were nullified, Pruitt admitted there were crimes committed on or near campus, noting USC’s location in an “urban setting, located in the heart of a vibrant and growing city.” Pruitt also touched on incidents in which suspects were identified and arrested. Arrests were made in two highly publicized cases at the end of last month, including a man who exposed himself to two female students near Women’s Quad and a separate incident on the Horseshoe in which man followed a student to his room in East Quad to rob him. Both of those incidents occurred in August.
But story or not, Hickman implored students to always report suspicious activity — an investigation will be conducted and notifications sent out in extenuating circumstances, he said.
“Even if we have to go back in the end and say that didn’t happen, that’s OK,” Hickman said. “We don’t want people to feel like reporting things is bad if they aren’t certain. It’s better to err on the side of caution.”