CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — Students huddled inside laboratory closets and darkened dorm rooms across the University of Virginia while others moved far away from library windows and barricaded the doors of its stately academic buildings after an ominous warning flashed on their screens: “RUN. HIDE. FIGHT.”
Responding to the immediate threat of an on-campus shooting was a moment they had prepared for since their first years of elementary school. But dealing with the emotional trauma of an attack that killed three members of the school’s football team late Sunday left students shaken and grasping to understand.
“This will probably affect our campus for a very, very long time,” said Shannon Lake, a third-year student from Crozet, Virginia.
For 12 hours, she hid with friends and other students, much of that time in a storage closet, while authorities searched into Monday morning for the suspect before he was taken into custody.
When Lake and the others heard someone might be right outside the business school building, they all decided to go into the closet, turn off the lights and barricade the door.
“That was probably the most terrifying moment because it became more real to us, and reminded us of those practice school lockdowns as children. And it was just kind of a surreal moment where, you know, I don’t think any of us were really processing what was going on,” she said.
Police charged 22-year-old student Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. with three counts of second-degree murder, saying the three victims were killed just after 10:15 p.m. as a charter bus full of students returned from seeing a play in Washington. Two other students were wounded.
University President Jim Ryan said authorities did not have a “full understanding” of the motive or circumstances surrounding the shooting.
Police conducted a building-by-building search of the campus while students sheltered in place before the lockdown order was lifted late Monday morning.
Charlotte Goeb, a student who lives in an apartment about a half-mile (800 meters) away from the shooting scene, immediately checked her doors and shut off the lights after getting an alert from the school.
“I’m having a hard time coming to terms that this was happening,” she said. “Even though you spend all of your upbringing knowing this can happen.”
Ellie Wilkie, a fourth-year student, was about to leave her room on the university’s prestigious, historic Lawn at the center…