Bomb Threat on Campus

The Pueblo County Sheriff’s Department was called out early Monday morning to investigate a bomb threat at CSU-Pueblo.
Just before 9 a.m. the main phone line of the university library received a call stating there is a bomb placed in an unspecified location on campus.
The Sheriff’s Department and Joe Gallegos, the campus safety officer, were notified immediately after the caller hung up.
Members of the university staff and the Sheriff’s Department were unable to trace the call and find out the exact location that the call was made from, said Cora Zaletel, executive director of external affairs at CSU-Pueblo.
Staff members were certain the call was made from a phone on campus because calls made from a campus phone number have a different ring tone than those made from an outside line, Zalatel said.
A team of personnel from the Sheriff’s Department and university staff from ITS and facilities responded to the threat by conducting a security sweep of all campus buildings, grounds and parking lots starting with the most heavily populated areas first, such as the Occhiato University Center, Belmont Residence Hall, the university library and the chemistry building, according to a press release from the university.
A security sweep is a walk through of facilities but is not an intense search, Zalatel said. It includes looking for things that are out of the ordinary or out of place. It tends to focus on main areas of the buildings first where the largest amount of activity would occur.
Each building was swept four times within 90 minutes of the call.
Nothing suspicious was found during the search.
In addition to the officers from the campus substation five additional officers from the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Department were called from surrounding areas to help with the security sweep, Zalatel said.
The search ended just before 11 a.m.
The university decided not to evacuate buildings or cancel classes. Sheriffs and staff members answered questions from students as they came in but did not want to cause alarm or added stress to students, Zalatel said.
The threat was a vague statement stating “there’s a bomb at your school,” according to an email from President Joe Garcia. He said the call showed signs of a hoax call made by someone trying to avoid an exam or otherwise get out of class.
The university has a past history of such occurrences. Usually when one call comes in and the university evacuates buildings and cancels classes, several more threats come in.
Law enforcement officials wanted to do a security sweep first to find out if the threat was legitimate before making the decision to cancel classes.
Sgt. Ray DeBiasi said the Sheriff’s Department relies on individuals to report things that look suspicious.
Zaletel said that students and staff do a pretty good job of reporting suspicious items such as unattended backpacks left in unusual locations, and that nothing was reported that was related to Monday’s bomb threat.
The last bomb threat at the university happened about seven years ago, before the sheriff’s office substation was created on campus.
“We are continuing to work on a comprehensive campus safety plan which takes into account the incidents that have occurred on other campuses in recent years.” President Joseph Garcia said in an email.
“That plan includes the development of a system that will allow us to provide immediate, campus-wide emergency notification of any threat to the safety of the campus community.”

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