The Oracle T U E S D AY, O C T O B E R 1 3 , 2 0 1 5 I V O L . 5 3 N O. 2 8
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News.................................................................1 Lifestyle......................................................4 Opinion.......................................................6
w w w. u s fo r a c l e. co m
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U N I V E R S I T Y O F S O U T H F LO R I DA
Lack of warning during shooting concerns students
LI F E STYLE
A look at how students balance work, school and play. Page 4
Montage
USF football player Benjamin Knox was released Monday on $32,500 bond. He is suspended from all team activities. S PORTS Volleyball standout has a will to win. BACK
Special to the Oracle
By Jeff Odom and Abby Rinaldi E D I T O R S
After a USF football player was arrested for firing multiple gunshots at the exterior of a campus residence hall early Sunday morning, some students voiced concerns that they were not notified of the incident in a timely fashion. Reserve offensive lineman Benjamin Knox, 21, was taken into custody and charged with discharging or possessing a firearm and shooting into an occupied dwelling after police
The damage to the outside of Holly D is believed to be the result of the shots fired by Benjamin Knox early Sunday morning. ORACLE PHOTO/ADAM MATHIEU say he fired at least two shots at the west side of the Holly D residence hall around 4 a.m. Students, however, weren’t alerted about the shooting right away. Instead, a school-wide email and university social media reported the incident nearly 12 hours later. One of the main concerns was that no bulletin was sent out by USF’s emergency notification system, which provides text messages to students
informing them of potentially hazardous situations on campus and in the surrounding community. “We only heard about it because people started complaining,” Rachel Janeck, an on-campus resident freshman majoring in behavioral health care, said. USF assistant police chief Chris Daniel said the primary reason there was no alert issued was the fact that no
individuals were found during the initial sweep of the area around Holly D, including the Crescent Hill parking garage, where an officer near the Greek Village and a student-resident reported hearing gunshots and screeching tires. Sending out an alert with no verified information, Daniel said, could have caused students to panic. “At no point during all of that
n See ALERT on PAGE 2
USF lobbies for $22.5 million for downtown medical school By Camila Yori C O R R E S P O N D E N T
USF is lobbying for $22.5 million in state funding to continue with the next phase of the downtown medical school plan. In February, USF’s request to relocate its new Morsani College of Medicine and USF Heart Institute to downtown Tampa was approved, and in June, Gov. Rick Scott allotted $17 million from the state budget to fund it. Though combining the medical school and the heart institute cut down on costs, the university is still seeking $22.5 million more from the state in 2016 to continue with this project.
The total cost for the project is about $153 million. According to the presentation given to the Florida Board of Governors (BOG) by USF President Judy Genshaft, $41 million of the total cost is expected to come from private sources. Meanwhile, the remaining $111.6 million is requested from the state and only $56.1 has been secured to date. According to Genshaft, the $22.5 million from the Florida Legislature in 2016 would keep construction on schedule to start in August of 2017 and finish for fall of 2019. The first step to fund any university construction proj-
ect is getting board approval. The BOG approves a 3-year Public Education Capital Outlay (PECO), a program that provides universities with grants construction and maintenance using taxes, which serves as a funding request. It is then submitted to the Legislature, which creates a budget for all universities to be approved by the Governor. According to the State University System of Florida website, PECO is the primary source — and sometimes the only source, depending on the state budget year — of facility funding for the System. When the BOG meets in
November, it will submit another list. The Legislature would then write the state budget and submit it to the Governor to sign off on. He can either approve the budget or veto it but not change it. Mark Walsh, USF assistant vice president for government relations, does not anticipate any shortcomings on the funding. “It’s not a slam dunk. It’s certainly not easy. A lot of work goes into it but I do believe it will happen because of our community buy in,” Walsh said. Genshaft did not seemed concerned with the funding,
n See LOBBYING on PAGE 2