Students, teacher scared by intruder drill

ELIZABETH CITY, N.C., Feb. 27 (UPI) -- A life-like drill on dealing with intruders proved frightening to a teacher and students at a North Carolina university who missed advisories announcing it.

Many had not received the announcement sent out by school officials or had forgotten about it by the time a "gunman" showed up in Jingbin Wang's foreign policy classroom at Elizabeth City State University, The (Raleigh) News & Observer reported. The drill last Friday occurred eight days after the shootings at Northern Illinois State University by a former student who invaded a classroom.

Wang said he was not aware of the drill and did not recognize the weapon involved as a plastic fake.

"I was prepared to die," he said.

The man, actually a campus police officer, forced the students to line up against a wall and then said he planned to shoot the one with the lowest grade-point average. About 10 minutes later, a group of campus police rushed the classroom.

University Vice Chancellor Anthony Brown said e-mail and text messages had been sent five days in advance. "The intent was not to frighten them, but to test our system, and also to test the response of the security," Brown said.