Bomb threats force building evacuations

Grace Ford Salvatori Hall, Sample Hall and Wallis Annenberg Hall were evacuated Thursday evening because of a bomb threat. Twenty-eight minutes after the community was notified, the Department of Public Safety and the Los Angeles Police Department announced the reopening of the buildings following searches.

DPS received a phone call at approximately 3:25 p.m. from an “unidentified male caller who claimed he had put explosive devices” in the buildings, said DPS Assistant Chief David Carlisle in an interview with the Daily Trojan. 

DPS sent out an alert ordering evacuations of the three buildings at 4:34 p.m. DPS officers were on scene and conducted their searches before the TrojansAlert was released, Carlisle said.

Carlisle said DPS is required to contact LAPD to handle bomb threats, who directs the investigation from there. 

“[LAPD] made an assessment and were determining whether or not to do an immediate search, evacuate the building and assess the entire situation, so, once those decisions were made, we have to follow the direction of the LAPD, and we consulted with our senior administrators and decided it was best to do an alert to the campus community and evacuate those buildings,” Carlisle said. 

LAPD confirmed in an interview with the Daily Trojan that officers found no evidence of a device or threat. 

A separate alert announced the reopenings at 5:02 p.m. 

The threat came at approximately the same time as similar threats at New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Multiple bomb threats were reported at other colleges and universities over the weekend, including Yale University on Nov. 5 and Brown University, Columbia University and Cornell University on Sunday.