Monday, April 15, 2024 | 4:16 p.m.
UNLV will reopen the classroom complex where an active shooter last December killed three professors and wounded another, officials said today.
Beam Hall, which has been closed for repairs since the tragedy, will hold about 160 classes in the fall, Provost Chris Heavey said during a meeting updating university leaders on the campus recovery following the Dec. 6., 2023 shooting.
The shooter, a man who was denied a teaching job in the business school, eventually was killed during a shootout with law enforcement outside of Beam Hall. Students were on lockdown for hours as police cleared campus.
“To think that we will know everything we needed to do from when all of this began, I will not say that we do — it’s been an ongoing set of challenges of what’s happened — and how we need as a community to be able to provide the services, the support, the thought, the actions (and) the strategy to be able to be more resilient,” UNLV President Keith Whitfield said during the update.
Security guards stand in front Beam Hall at UNLV Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2024.
When people walk into Beam Hall in late August, they’ll find a new security kiosk in the atrium with a full-time security employee — referred to as a yellow jacket — stationed from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. all week. Security cameras now dot the walls of all five stories in Beam Hall, with the possibility of more being added, said UNLV Police Chief Adam Garcia.
Fixtures that were damaged during the Dec, 6 mass shooting are set to be repaired by the end of August, and Beam Hall will specifically have new pilot programs in place such as the addition of keycard access to floors three through five at stairwells and the elevator.
The offices of the three slain professors are not going to be reused. The university’s memorial committee is still deciding what the plans will be going forward, said Dr. William Robinson, faculty senate chair.
Upgrades to infrastructure are not only being implemented in Beam Hall, but across campus and institutions within the state, officials said.
“We have issues all across the campus: we have security issues in the fine arts areas; we have security issues in the library; we have security issues in the student union,” Robinson said. “We have to have a standard. The campus has to have a standard of how we’re going to build security into our campus, and it needs to reach across the campus.”
Garcia, the chairman of the Chancellor’s Committee of Public Safety, said they were able to lobby for a $2.6 million allocation from the state for enhanced security at UNLV, College of Southern Nevada, the Desert Research Institute and Nevada State University.
The money is going towards additional staffing of “yellow-jacket security folks” who visibly patrol campus, Garcia said.
The committee will submit recommendations to the state Board of Regents for approval.
One of the recommendations is a system-wide change of the locking mechanisms so that they use a “one-action motion” allowing people to lock doors from the inside using only a pushing or twisting motion. Emergency response teams would be provided with a key, key card or code that would give them the ability to unlock the doors during an emergency without causing any damage, Garcia said.
More recommendations include developing a system-wide policy for the approval, placement and funding of panic alarms in “vulnerable areas,” mandatory safety language addressing “active assailant events,” and the creation of a system-wide emergency notification system so all institutions in the Nevada System of Higher Education would receive an emergency alert simultaneously.
The three slain professors — Naoko Takemaru, Patricia Navarro Velez and Jerry Cha-Jan Chang — will be temporarily memorialized in the outdoor courtyard near the William F. Harrah College of Hospitality.
Robinson said “there should be progress fairly soon on putting a temporary memorial into that site” and that it “seems like a logical place for the permanent memorial to be.”
