A white college student suspected of posting online threats to shoot black students and faculty at the University of Missouri was arrested on Wednesday, adding to the racial tension at the heart of the protests that led two top administrators to resign earlier this week.
Hunter Park, a 19-year-old sophomore studying computer science at a sister campus in Rolla, was arrested shortly before 2am at a residence hall, authorities said. The school said no weapons were found.
Park, who has not yet been formally charged, is enrolled at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. He was jailed in Columbia, about 120 km to the northwest, where he was booked on a preliminary charge of suspicion of making a terrorist threat. Because the county courts were closed for Veterans Day, he was not expected to appear before a judge until at least yesterday.
The author of the posts, which showed up on Tuesday on the anonymous location-based messaging app YikYak and other social media, threatened to “shoot every black person I see.”
The posts followed the resignations on Monday of the University of Missouri system president and the chancellor of its flagship campus in Columbia.
Months of protests culminated in a tumultuous week on the Columbia campus.
In September, the student government president reported that people shouted racial slurs at him from a passing pickup truck, galvanizing the protest movement. Last week, a graduate student went on a hunger strike to demand the resignation of university system president Tim Wolfe over his handling of racial complaints.
Then more than 30 members of the Missouri football team refused to practice or play in support of the hunger striker. Those developments came to a head on Monday with the resignation of Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, the top administrator of the Columbia campus.
On Wednesday afternoon, authorities were investigating a second threat on YikYak, this one leveled at the Rolla campus by someone who said: “I’m gonna shoot up this school.”
When the first threat emerged, the school’s online emergency information center tweeted: “There is no immediate threat to campus,” and asked students not to spread rumors.
Park has excelled academically in science. As a senior early last year at Wentzville’s Holt High School, he was a member of the school district’s robotics team when he won the honors division for a project titled “A Novel Method for Determination of Camera Pose Estimation Based on Angle Constraints.”
The St Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the project advanced to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles.
A spokeswoman for the Rolla school, Mary Helen Stoltz, said she did not know whether the university planned to take any action against Park over his arrest.
On Wednesday, student foot traffic in Columbia was light as freshman Megan Grazman was on her way to class. Although she said she felt safe, she said: “There’s nobody out. It’s a ghost town. It’s kind of eerie.”
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