Students were barred from entering Tucker Hall Wednesday morning after a reported bomb threat caused authorities to evacuate the building.
University spokeswoman LaNedra Carroll said the threat was called in around 7:15 a.m. Wednesday. FAMU Police Department officers arrived on the scene shortly thereafter, cleared the building, but didn’t find the bomb.
Apparently, it was a false alarm. By 9:45 a.m., Carroll said everything was back to normal.
“Classes had resumed, the building was occupied again,” she said. “So there was nothing to the bomb threat.”
Sgt. Jack Adkins of the Tallahassee Police Department Hazardous Devices Team said it’s always better to be safe than sorry when it comes to handling such threats.
“It’s 100 percent real until you know it’s 100 percent not real,” said Adkins, who was on standby with other TPD officials near the payphone where the call was suspected to originate.
Adkins said he wasn’t sure why the threat was made because his department is not directly involved with the investigation. FAMU PD would not comment to The Famuan at the scene of the incident. They did not disclose why they had evacuated the building shortly after their arrival to Tucker Hall and did not return phone calls later in the day.
A staff member of Dean Larry E. Rivers’ office in 208 Tucker Hall said Officer Derrick Folson of FAMU PD told her the building was evacuated because of a bomb threat, but students who were turned away were not told why they could not go to class.
“They just turned us around,” said Charles McCollum, 19, a freshman physical education student from Atlanta who was on his way to his English class before officials turned him away.
Adkins said bomb threats could be made for a number of reasons.
“In the past, a lot of times, people made bomb threats not to kill people, but to make a statement,” Adkins said. “Obviously in today’s world, things are a little bit different.”
Adkins said bomb threats today aren’t just made to make statements by disgruntled former employees.
Nowadays, bomb threats could be made to shut down buildings for people who may not want to appear in court, or possibly students who don’t want to go to class.
Much like Wednesday’s scare, many of these threats may be false alarms.
Carroll said, “The bottom line is there was nothing there.”