Part II: JMU’s emergency response system overnight

Friday sparks outrage

By GRANT JOHNSON & ELEANOR SHAW

The Breeze

students grapple with the fallout of the overnight Friday shooting, which is the fourth shooting to occur in off-campus student housing within 6 months. Lizzie Stone / The Breeze from REDPOINT PART I, page 1

Editor’s note: The Breeze’s reporting on the shooting and aftermath at the Redpoint residential complex overnight Friday is split up into four parts — the first two in this week’s print edition and online at breezejmu.org Thursday, and the last two to publish online by Saturday. The Breeze is referring to the shooting as occurring “overnight Friday” throughout the series for clarity, though it happened just after midnight Saturday morning.

Nuevo called Redpoint one of the nicer o ff-campus apartment complexes — its $814 per month rent on average is more expensive than Foxhill, Southview and North 38. Redpoint also sits high on a hill, with its brick and vinyl siding overlooking fields and rolling hills deep into Rockingham County, which, Nuevo said, should imply protection.

“I mean, it doesn’t matter, I guess,” Nuevo said.

If someone asked senior Sophia Silva why she chose JMU, she would’ve said Harrisonburg is “safer” than her hometown, Richmond — which has a score of C+, according to CrimeGrade. Now, Silva calls Harrisonburg “a smaller version of Richmond.”

“I love my hometown, but it’s dangerous,” Silva said. “But with the way that the trend has been, we’ve had more [shootings] than I think I’ve ever read, like ever, in Harrisonburg.”

While college students often want to have fun and be wild, Nuevo said “you really can’t just invite random people to your house.” She said the shooting overnight Friday also reminded her to think before she acts.

Tim Miller, JMU vice president for student affairs, said in an interview with The Breeze on Monday he shares the off-campus safety concerns that many students have. He said he worries for students who host parties open to anyone; parties should be more selective and have invites just for people the host knows, he added, and party-goers should know the whereabouts of their friend group if they separate from it.

“There’s a lot of walking by, if you see an event, you just walk into it. You don’t know whose place that is,” Miller said. “We have to lift those rose-colored glasses that we know everybody and everybody’s safe and everybody’s fine.”

But not all off-campus residents are spooked by the recent shootings. Junior Corrine Kent, also a Redpoint resident, said she thinks the recent off-campus shootings are “not really random” and are a result of who people hang out with. The Redpoint shooting kind of changed Kent’s perspective on off-campus safety, she said.

“A lot of things happen in a ‘safe place,’” Kent said. “You kind of avoid it.”

Junior Jacob Grobe, who lives on Bradley Drive — roughly 2.6 miles away from the Redpoint shooting — echoed a similar sentiment, saying, “I’m never, like, looking over my shoulder” when taking the trash outside to the dumpster.

Redpoint resident and graduate student Haley Gardner, who said she’s experienced a shooting in her apartment complex each of her last three years living off campus at JMU — North 38 in 2020-21, Charleston Townes in September 2021 and Redpoint this past week — said, despite all that, she “generally” feels safe because she sleeps in a locked-door house, “but the fact that shootings have happened is a little concerning.”

Two-year Foxhill resident and senior Martina Wulf said she didn’t feel unsafe last year, but this year, that’s changed. She said she got a master lock after hearing about Bryan Kohberger, who stabbed four female students to death at the University of Idaho — all of whom were likely asleep when the attack began, according to a coroner’s report in a CNN article — in November. Wulf said she doesn’t walk alone in any street in Harrisonburg and that being alone in her house is scary.

“Based on the things that have been happening,” Wulf said, also speaking for the rest of her roommates, “like, we’re being very careful.”

Sophomore Megan Bennett, who lives in a different apartment complex near Foxhill on Devon Lane, also bolstered her home security system shortly after winter break with a Ring Video Doorbell, which she said her parents wanted her to get after incidents on Devon Lane in the fall.

Bennett described the recent shootings as “definitely unsettling” and said they make her feel a little unsafe leaving her apartment. She said she was out Friday night and her apartment door was unlocked, so she and her roommates all rushed to get home because she didn’t know where the shooter could be going.

Friday’s overnight shooting brought a different kind of scare for Nico McMillen, Nuevo’s boyfriend who lives in North 38: It resurfaced his memories of the North 38 shooting — which he said occurred in the apartment directly below him. During that January shooting, he received a call from his brother, sophomore Alex McMillen, who lives with Nico.

During the call, Nico said Alex was crying, panicking and could hear the screams of those involved. Nico instructed Alex to lock the doors and wait until police arrived. Once police showed up, Alex was uninjured and Nico said he’s grateful “a stray bullet didn’t come through the floor.”

“You just never expect that to, like, happen to anybody else,” Nico said. “It’s super sad, but you’re never like, ‘Oh, yeah, this could happen to me or this could happen to my brother.’”

After the North 38 shooting, Nico said he felt unsafe in his apartment and, consequently, spent a couple of night at Nuevo’s Redpoint apartment. After the Redpoint shooting, Nuevo stayed at North 38, to which Nico said the fact shootings occurred at both residences was “scary for the both of us.”

Kayla Brown contributed to this report.

CONTACT Grant Johnson at breezeeditor@ gmail.com and Eleanor Shaw at breezenews@ gmail.com. For more coverage of JMU and Harrisonburg news, follow the news desk on Twitter @BreezeNewsJMU.

JMU students overnight Friday not only dealt with a shooting in their community but also what some called confusing messaging from the school in interviews with The Breeze, comments on Sidechat and in off-campus housing group chats.

The shooting occurred “shortly after midnight” Saturday, according to the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office’s press release. JMU’s initial report was released at 12:48 a.m. and informed students of a “heavy police presence” and a shelter-in-place order. The order was lifted by JMU at 1:55 a.m.

Senior Martina Wulf said she didn’t know for sure a shooting happened at Redpoint because JMU didn’t say so in its messaging overnight Friday — it was labeled an “incident” and not specifically a shooting. However, she said her initial thought was that it was a shooting, prompting her to stay at a friend’s house overnight Friday instead of coming home to her Foxhill Townhomes residence because she was nervous to leave.

And for sophomore Megan Bennett, who was also out of her Devon Lane apartment, she said the lack of alerts — and a killer being on the loose, who, as of Wednesday evening, the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office hasn’t announced being caught — piled onto her rush to get home immediately. Not knowing what was going on, who the killer was or where they could be going worried Bennett with her apartment both unattended and unlocked, she said.

“I just felt like there was more they could do for us,” Bennett said. “I don’t know, maybe they didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I felt like the people around us also had a better idea than, like, what we were getting.”

In a GroupMe group chat obtained by The Breeze for residents of Campus View Condominiums — which is right on the other side of a hill from Redpoint — senior Sophia Silva echoed Bennett’s lack-of-information complaints, encouraging fellow Campus View residents to use Sidechat to find out more regarding the shooting because it’s “better than whatever the f*** jmu is putting out.”

On Sidechat, while some users prayed and grieved about the situation overnight Friday, many others also criticized the wording of JMU’s messaging: “Calling the shooting an ‘incident’ is like calling an active tornado a ‘weather event.’”

However, Tim Miller, JMU vice president for student affairs, said the school’s response served a purpose. Bennett said she thinks JMU could’ve been more specific or told people what they can do to be safe beyond, “If you’re in the surrounding area, shelter in place,” but Miller said JMU’s goal is to be clear, concise and quick with its messaging.

Miller said JMU “isn’t the owner of the news,” and it’s not a police department’s priority to alert the school right away after off-campus incidents — rather, they secure the scene and look for the suspect first. It’s different when an incident occurs on JMU’s campus, which in that case, Miller said, “We control that — that’s our scene.” Miller said students who are on a scene off campus often learn about incidents faster than JMU because the school can’t afford to disseminate news off hearsay and risk making a mistake. So, Miller said, when JMU got the information filtered to them from the police officers who were on the scene overnight Friday, the message JMU sent out sufficed.

“When we tell you there’s an incident, tell you where it is and tell you to shelter in place, that’s the most, best message we can give you in that moment, and that’s actually all you need to know for what we want, which is for you to stay safe,” Miller said. “I know students want us to say and there was a, you know, it was a shooting, and it was this and it was this. That’s not actually necessary in the moment for us to get the message, again, as quickly as we can and clear and concise. If we try and send you a twoparagraph message, you’re not reading that.”

In an email to The Breeze on Tuesday, Mary-Hope Vass, JMU executive director of communications and university spokesperson, added that Rockingham County — the county where Friday’s overnight shooting happened — isn’t in the JMU Police Department’s jurisdiction, so it didn’t have investigative authority nor the lead investigating agency; Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office did.

The Breeze also asked Vass in its email if JMU will make adjustments to its safety notification protocols or if it’s providing support to off-campus students in the wake of the Redpoint shooting, which she didn’t address in her response.

CONTACT Grant Johnson at breezeeditor@ gmail.com and Eleanor Shaw at breezenews@gmail.com

For more coverage of JMU and Harrisonburg news, follow the news desk on Twitter @BreezeNewsJMU.