Just hours after two graduate students at Louisiana State University were shot to death Thursday night in a campus apartment building, LSU officials used their new emergency-notification system to send text messages to about 8,400 students who had signed up for the service. Because of a technical glitch, however, an undetermined number of those messages never arrived.
“Some folks who are part of that system did not receive a notification by that particular means,” said Sean C. O’Keefe, the chancellor, at a Webcast news conference on Friday morning. “We notified and consulted with the provider of that particular service at about 2 o’clock this morning and worked through a series of issues there. There are some technical challenges that they obviously encountered.”
LSU officials did not know how many of the registered users failed to receive the message, Mr. O’Keefe said. But he noted that the university also sent e-mail notifications to everyone with a campus e-mail address, as well as voice-mail messages to those who had signed up for that. Additionally, officials went door-to-door notifying residents of the apartment complex, which is reserved for graduate students and married students.
Stuart Watkins, a sophomore who is a member of the student government, said in an interview today that he had never received the emergency text message, despite having signed up for the service. He added that after asking around, “I haven’t spoken to anyone who did receive the text message.”
“They did a big thing trying to get as many students as they could to sign up for it” in the spring, when the service was introduced, said Mr. Watkins. “This is a safety precaution that LSU was taking, and it didn’t work.”
Brian Nichols, chief IT-security and policy officer at the university, declined to answer questions about the emergency-notification service, referring a reporter to the public-relations office. An official there also declined to elaborate.
An announcement on LSU’s Web site notes that the service is provided by ClearTXT. Officials of that company did not return calls for comment. —Jeffrey R. Young
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