HBCU Students Call for More Safety Measures After Shooting

Elizabeth City State University students are pushing for more safety measures at the historically Black university in North Carolina after their annual outdoor spring celebration was disrupted by gunshots last month.

A sudden shooting injured six people on the quad in the early morning hours after the event on April 27. Four of them—including three students—sustained gunshot wounds, and two students were injured in the commotion that followed, according to a statement from the university that day. A visitor to campus, 24-year-old Isaiah Caldwell, was killed. In a social media post, Groove Phi Groove Social Fellowship Incorporated, a national Black men’s fellowship with campus chapters, identified him as one of their members from Albany, who was “simply enjoying himself, fellowshiping, and bonding with campus students” before he was shot.

“We extend our deepest condolences to his family, friends and loved ones during this incredibly difficult time” and are “sending support and well wishes to our students who were injured,” Catherine Edmonds, the university’s interim chancellor, wrote in a statement the following day. “The safety and well-being of our students, faculty, staff, and community remain our highest priorities.”

The university’s police department and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation are investigating the incident and “relentlessly pursuing the person or people responsible,” according to a May 3 security update from the university. The campus canceled all classes and events for two days after and held the semester’s remaining three days of classes and final exams online.

Kayla Dixon, the outgoing Student Government Association president, described the night of the shooting as “traumatic” for students who fled the quad and hunkered down in their dorms on lockdown. She said the mood among students has been “sad” and “gloomy” since.

“The whole school was in a state of shock, because we were just having a good time out there in the yard, just enjoying the time that we have with each other,” she said. “It kind of just startled everybody and had us really lost for words.”

Now students are calling for enhanced campus safety protocols in the aftermath of the shooting. Some have accused the University of North Carolina system—of which Elizabeth City State is a part—of not doing enough in response. System leaders say they’re doing what they can to comfort students and secure the campus.

A Call for Safety and Support

Four days after the incident, a group of 33 student leaders, including Dixon, other members of the SGA and presidents of student clubs, sent a letter to the UNC system, university and local college leaders claiming that, as far as they were aware, the system had yet to make a public statement about the shooting. (That same day, Ivy Taylor, the UNC system’s senior adviser to the president, read a statement by system president Peter Hans at a campus event, according to Andy Wallace, director of media relations for the UNC system.

Students emphasized in the letter that when a faculty member at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was fatally shot in 2023, allegedly by a graduate student, the system president issued a statement the following day.

“We ask not for special treatment—only for equal recognition,” the letter read. “Our students, faculty, and families deserve to be seen and heard. Our loss deserves to be mourned. And our healing deserves to be supported with the same urgency afforded to any other campus in crisis.”

In their letter, students also called for specific safety measures, including improved lighting in parts of campus known to be dark, more emergency call boxes throughout the campus, mandatory active shooter drills, a faster campus alert system and additional security protocols for events, including officers at every gate and an ambulance on site.

Briana Singletary, president of the campus NAACP chapter, said safety has always been a concern for students, given Elizabeth City State is an open campus in a high-crime area. She believes it’s worth sacrificing some of the campus’s openness “to keep the students who are paying to be students there safe.” She noted shots have been fired on the yard before.

“People can just walk on our campus,” she said. “What happened this go-round, again, was people from the community coming to our campus and not giving our campus the love that it deserves.” She worries the university police are too “short-staffed” to adequately address the campus’s safety challenges, though she described the university’s police chief as “very competent” and widely trusted by students, unlike on some other campuses across the country, where tensions with police run high.

The latest public security update from the university, issued May 3, emphasized that law enforcement officials did a sweep of the crime scene and every building on campus following the incident and are now following up on multiple leads.

Wallace said in an email to Inside Higher Ed that the system has “provided daily and ongoing assistance” to the university, including by sending extra security personnel from the system office and other campuses, helping with safety planning and messaging, and making 24-7 teletherapy available to Elizabeth City State students with referrals to in-person counselors or counselors on other campuses if the university’s mental health services become overloaded.

“We will continue to support Elizabeth City State University students, faculty, and staff in the weeks ahead as they recover from this tragedy,” he wrote. “We continually evaluate safety on all UNC system campuses and we are committed to providing a secure and healthy learning environment for all students. Our campuses are safer than their surrounding communities, but any violence on any UNC System campus is unacceptable.”

Hans, in the statement shared by his senior adviser, also emphasized that the system is “working every day to strengthen the law enforcement response; to open more crisis counseling options for students” and “to aid campus leaders with media requests and communications needs.”

“My team and I have been in constant touch with campus leaders, with state officials, with local officials in Elizabeth City,” he wrote. “And we will continue doing everything we can to ensure that students, faculty, and staff have the support they deserve through this tragedy.”

But for Evette Romero, corresponding secretary for the Student Government Association, the statement of support felt like it came too late. She said the letter from student leaders still hasn’t received a response.

The four-day delay “just didn’t feel right at all,” she said. “We don’t know what’s going on, and I know that things are still confidential, but they could at least have been like, ‘Hey, the UNC system is here in support.’”