Hundreds of staff and students were evacuated from the
complex on Dec. 5 after a suspicious package was discovered in the
device was ultimately determined to be a hoax, questions regarding campus
officials’ prior knowledge of the threat persist, according to a local union
representative.
All buildings in the
along with the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences Cellular
and Molecular Medicine East building, were evacuated after the package was
discovered inside Leichtag at 10:26 a.m., according to FBI Special Agent
Darrell Foxworth. At approximately 1 p.m., a campuswide e-mail from Vice
Chancellor of Business Affairs Steven W. Relyea announced the evacuation and
advised students and staff members to avoid the buildings.
Employees from the FBI, San Diego Police Department, UCSD
Police Department, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, San Diego
Fire-Rescue Department and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol responded to the
scene, which was then swept for other suspicious devices.
“The Metro-Arson Task Force took the necessary steps to
render safe the device,” Foxworth said. “It was determined that it was a hoax
device and not an actual device.”
After determining that the package was not an actual bomb,
officers turned the scene over to the evidence response team at approximately
5:15 p.m. The evacuation was contained and no one was hurt, Foxworth said.
Skaggs research associate Wenru Yu said that she received a
phone call from a friend at Leichtag telling her to evacuate, but continued
working until the alarm in her building went off.
“No one panicked,” Yu said. “We get lots of false alarms.”
After waiting outside their buildings for several hours,
employees were informed they would receive administrative leave for the day and
were permitted to go home, Deputy Director of University Communications Dolores
Davies said.
Classes in nearby Center Hall were not canceled, though
signs were posted warning passersby that there was a bomb scare across the
street.
Foxworth declined to comment on the timeline of events
leading up to the evacuation, and said he did not know when UCSD was initially
aware of the threat.
However, Professional and Technical Employees Local 9
President Carolan Buckmaster said that campus officials were informed of the
threats as early as the evening of Dec. 4, but still had School of Medicine
employees report to work the next morning.
Buckmaster said that workers in the building’s vivariums —
facilities in which animal research is performed — were told that threats were
directed toward “the animal facility.” They were also asked to “look for any
more suspicious objects” before they evacuated, she added.
“The UC received a threat last night against an animal
facility and they let employees into the building this morning,” Buckmaster
said. “As one of the workers and a representative for the workers, we were very
disappointed that the university let the employees into work today.”
A timeline of the day’s events will be released when more
details are made public, Foxworth said.
Leichtag researcher and UCSD graduate student Minh-Ha Do,
one of the employees evacuated from the building, said that her coworkers
appeared to have been aware of a threat more than an hour before the device was
discovered.
“People knew of the threat by 9 o’clock, and the alarm went
off between 10:30 to 11 o’clock,” Do said.
Revelle College senior Rachel Intriago, another researcher
at Leichtag, said the building had
received harassing phone calls from an animal-rights group the day before the
threat was received.
Buckmaster said that the Animal Liberation Front, a
prominent animal-rights activist group, contacted Leichtag the night before and
the morning of the threat.
“They said, ‘This is going to be huge,’” she said.
ALF representatives could not be reached for comment as of
press time.
UPTE officials are planning to write a letter to Chancellor
Marye Anne Fox detailing their grievances about how administrators handled the
situation, Buckmaster said.
“We’ll be writing her to tell her how unhappy we are, and
that we don’t want this happening again,” she said.
