By Olivia Krauth and Jacob Abrahamson–
UPDATE at 3:37 p.m.: U of L posted an official statement on its Facebook page: “UofL received a note on a Twitter account with a threat against the university. While there was no specific information, the university takes these threats seriously and issued an alert. Because of the alert a student came forth with information. Police are interviewing the student and have identified a suspect. It is our belief that there is no current danger to the university.”
UPDATE at 3:15 p.m.: A new Rave alert gives the all clear and says police are interviewing the person of interest. U of L spokesperson Mark Hebert said ULPD is currently briefing the provost, and should have an official statement soon. Hebert said the tweet seemed to be a “bad joke gone awry.”
UPDATE at 3:12 p.m. : U of L News (@uofl) has tweeted: “The account who posted the comment has apologized and said the account was compromised and he would never say this about UofL.”
Original story at 2:48: A Rave alert sent out at 2:40 p.m. alerting the U of L community of a potential shooting situation.
The notice said U of L Police received a tweet from an unknown source that said he was coming to “shoot up” U of L.
The tweet in question show a man pointing a gun and wearing a bandanna and sunglasses, while sitting in a car. There is one other person next to him, and he appears to be wearing some type of equipment.
A second tweet also shows the man holding up a gun, but he is not wearing sunglasses. It is captioned with gun emoticons.
According to the twitter account that the threatening tweet came from, the suspect is a freshman at U of L.
Approximately one hour after the threatening tweets, the user tweeted, “I apologize for the tweets, they were not mine and I would never joke about something like that.”
More tweets from the account, posted at approximately 3 p.m., claim to be from a friend of the account owner who was tweeting as a joke. The user’s twitter default pictures appear to contain a different person than the one in the threatening pictures.
Report any suspicious activity to (502)852-6111.