Police respond to call of man with gun in Cathedral

As police searched for someone carrying a gun inside the Cathedral of Learning Wednesday,… As police searched for someone carrying a gun inside the Cathedral of Learning Wednesday, classes within continued without interruption, while students and professors remained unaware of what was happening around them.

Shortly before 4 p.m., Pitt police officers entered the Cathedral after receiving a phone call alleging that someone in a class had a gun on him.

Pitt spokesman John Fedele said that officers responded to Room 324, where the man was said to be. But the class ended at the same time that the 911 call came in, so the room was already empty when the police arrived.

The Cathedral was not evacuated nor did Pitt send out an Emergency Notification Service alert, which they have done in the past in response to bomb threats made to Pitt buildings.

“The threat is substantially different with a bomb,” Fedele said, “because it could affect the entire building.”

Because the caller said that the man did not have the weapon drawn, the police did not consider the threat serious enough to notify people in the building. Also, there were no factors other than the original 911 call to give officials a reason to issue an alert, Fedele said.

Despite this, police searched the building for the white male described by the caller, but did not find anyone matching the description.

“They’re taking this seriously,” Fedele said.

Pitt junior Lauren Kyle was studying in the Cathedral commons room when she saw about 10 police officers patrolling the building.

“I really didn’t know what was going on,” she said. “They really don’t give you a lot of information.”

The police didn’t tell anyone in the building what they were doing. Kyle said she wished they would have told people in the building about the situation.

“I feel like you always imagine it’s something worse,” she said.

A Pitt employee working in the Cathedral, who could not give her name because she isn’t authorized to speak to the media, said that she was happy with how the police responded.

“I think I have confidence in the Pitt police to make the right judgment,” she said. “Sometimes, disruption could be much worse than an event that wasn’t real.”

Pitt student Joe Mccaffrey was doing work in the Cathedral while police, unbeknownst to him, searched the building for a man with a gun.

Upon hearing what happened, Mccaffrey said he was “surprised, maybe a little creeped out,” that he didn’t know about the scene playing out around him.

While he would’ve preferred to have been told what was going on, Mccaffrey said he wasn’t going to leave the Cathedral because of it.

It is against the law to carry a gun on Pitt’s campus, even if one has a permit to carry a concealed weapon elsewhere.