Man taken into custody in connection to online threat directed at Edmonton’s MacEwan University

Edmonton police took a man into custody Tuesday in connection to an online threat made towards MacEwan University.

Police said officers went to a home in Sherwood park at around 11:30 a.m. Tuesday and took a 19-year-old man into custody. Charges are pending against the individual.

MacEwan University security services director Raymond Boudreau said a post was made on the social media platform Chillabit that indicated there was potential for violence at the university.

“The post was very general. It was a post that [had] no name, no identity,” Boudreau said.

Boudreau said Edmonton police were called at around 3 a.m. Tuesday after the post was discovered. Officers were on scene at MacEwan University campuses throughout the morning as an investigation was underway to determine the source of the threat and its seriousness.

The school remained open Tuesday morning and there were no plans to change class schedules, but the university did increase its security along with the police presence in and around the school.

The university said it takes all threats seriously and “responds accordingly to maintain a safe environment for everyone.”

“We are trying to cause the least amount of disruption but, at the same time, provide that strategy that ensures the safe environment,” Boudreau said.

Brandon Besant, a second-year criminology student, said he first heard of the potential threat at around 7 a.m. through friends posting about it on social media. He said he showed up at school to a heavy police presence and felt scared.

“I didn’t really know how to respond because we have an alert system here, like a text alert, but MacEwan never sent out a text. We didn’t get an email until probably 9:20 this morning,” he said. “I talked to some of my profs and they didn’t even know what was going on.

“I was in class this morning but I couldn’t concentrate. Nobody was. I looked around – my class regularly has 45 people in it and there was 16 in there this morning.”

Besant felt that the school could have done more to alert students earlier about the threat. He said the heightened security and police presence made him feel a bit more at ease, but added other steps could have been taken.

“There’s no way of screening who comes in. They’re not stopping and searching bags so it’s still a scary experience,” he said. “I think school should have been stopped for the day.

“With all that’s happening in the United States and some of the threats that are happening up here you don’t want to take a risk,” he continued.

“The biggest complaint is people saying, ‘we shouldn’t have to choose between a midterm and our life.'”

Student Stephanie Gleason also would have liked the university to have handled the reported threat differently. The first year arts student said it took the school too long to inform students and staff about the situation.

Gleason said she first learned about the reported threat from fellow students on social media early Tuesday morning. It wasn’t until about two-and-a-half hours later that the university informed faculty and students about the situation, according to Gleason.

“It was very surprising actually, where the only information anybody is getting is from student to student,” Gleason said.

“If the school was notified and if Edmonton police was notified, they should have at least notified the professors to be like: ‘this is what’s going on.’ That in itself was pretty unsettling that there was no notification made to the faculty of the school.”

Gleason said she left the university in the morning after writing a mid-term because she didn’t feel safe. She feels the university should have cancelled classes.

“You’re kind of put in a position where it’s like, OK, we don’t know the seriousness of this threat, but … am I trying to choose here between my safety and my grades?” Gleason said.

“It was just really stressful, given everything that’s happened in the States and Canada, I don’t feel any threat is too small to be taken seriously.”

Boudreau said the university takes all risks very seriously but stressed the school was never at imminent risk.

“That’s the trigger to closure. If the university was, if anybody at the university was, at imminent risk, that would have been done. With the information we had, that wasn’t the case,” he said.

Boudreau said an email was sent to students rather than using the university’s text alert system because the alert system is only used when there is an imminent risk.

“The reason why we don’t overuse it is because when a person gets an alert from MacEwan alerts, we expect them to read it and act immediately,” he said.

“I can assure you that if anyone on our footprint was in any imminent risk because of this post, they would have received that text.”

When asked about the timing of when the email was sent to students, Boudreau said the university worked with Edmonton police to determine the severity of the threat and gather all the correct information before anything was passed along to students.

“We’re not confident that we had all the accuracy we needed on this post. When we had that information, we used a platform within our internal email system. That was the safest way of getting the information to the people who were here.”

“The world of social media is that these things get communicated sooner than we even know what the risks are.”

After the man was taken into custody in Sherwood Park, police said they believed there was no longer a risk to the school or public.

Watch below: There was a police presence at MacEwan University Tuesday as Edmonton police investigated a reported online threat to the school.