Ottawa Police Services (OPS) were called to Carleton’s campus at around 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 28 amid reports of gun shots in Tory Building. The reports were later confirmed to be false.
Reports of heavy police presence circulated on Sunday night, with students being advised not to leave several buildings due to an “emergency situation.”
The emergency situation was lifted around 6:45 p.m. after the cause of the gun shot sounds was identified as several balloons being popped at a sorority meeting.
Two students at Carleton—who requested to remain anonymous—said they were in Tory when the sounds were initially heard.
“We were having a chapter [sorority] meeting, and then all we hear is . . . it sounded like gun shots,” they said.
They said multiple girls were heard screaming and running after the balloon popping sounds went off. They said three people notified the police and others were holding the room door shut after hearing the sounds.
“Obviously if you hear loud bangs and screaming and running, the first you’re going to think about is ‘oh, it’s a shooting,’ ” they said.
“We ran for our lives,” they said. They added they were at 360 Tory when the incident occurred.
Jeremy Finkelstein, a fourth-year computer science student, was at a meeting in 210 Tory during the incident, and said someone came by to tell them to stay inside and turn off the lights.
“I guess about five or 10 minutes passed, and before we knew it there was four or five different police officers just walking, patrolling the halls,” Finkelstein said. “They came in to inspect the classroom with AK-47s and a bunch of other firearms.”
Finkelstein said the police looked through their bags to see if there was anything potentially dangerous.
OPS Const. Marc Soucy confirmed that police arrived on campus after receiving a call, but said they soon realized there was no shooting.
“It was not a false call,” Soucy said. “Somebody thought that was really going on, and we have a due diligence to investigate those.”
It took 20 to 30 minutes before Finkelstein said he was told what was happening. “In the meantime we were just sitting in the corner with our mouths shut, basically wondering what was going on,” he said.
The two anonymous students said they left 360 Tory after police officers came and informed them about the cause of the sounds.
“[The police] said a sorority . . . was having a reveal and they popped 80 balloons at the same time,” they said. “If we didn’t know that or have a warning obviously we’d think that it was gun shots.”
– With files from Ana Staffen
