“Yo, there’s someone running around with two blades going around and attacking people,” one student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, reportedly alerted their friend via text message on Wednesday afternoon.
The person was studying with a group of students in Hagey Hall when he received this terrifying notification, and explained that they decided to barricade the door of the room where they were studying.
Eventually, CTV News reported, he waited in the room where he was studying until the student saw officers of the Waterloo Regional Police Service (WRPS) arresting a person, believed to be responsible for stabbing three people during a gender studies class earlier that afternoon.
Here’s everything we know about the incident that, WRPS superintendent Shaena Morris said, remains under investigation:
Motive remains unclear
At a news briefing on Wednesday, Ms Morris said officers responded to a stabbing incident at the University of Waterloo at 3.30pm on Wednesday. She said the attack took place in a classroom inside Hagey Hall.
Speaking alongside her, the university’s associate vice president of communications, Nick Manning, told reporters a second-year philosophy lecture “Phil 202” was underway at the time. According to the university’s website, Phil 202 is a gender issues class for second-year students at the university.
Both Ms Morris and Mr Manning confirmed the suspected attacker was a member of the University of Waterloo community, without elaborating how the male suspect was connected to the institution.
According to the University of Waterloo’s student newspaper, an eye-witness who was present in the class, student Jinming Li said the attacker looked like he was in his 20s or 30s.
“I can’t speak to motive at this time. Obviously, we are under investigation currently, but we do have investigators with our person under arrest determining that right now,” Ms Morris said.
Three people – including two students and the professor – were injured in the stabbing attack. They were sent to hospital, with non-life-threatening injuries.
She added that no charges have been filed yet, and declined to comment on any evidence in the ongoing investigation.
A file photo shows students on the University of Waterloo— (The Canadian Press)
How the attack unfolded
According to Li, the attacker entered the room on the first floor of Hagey Hall and asked the professor – who has not been identified – what the class was about. He then closed the door, took out two knives from his backpack, and attacked the professor, as around 40 students scrambled to exit the single-entrance classroom.
Another student who was in the class when the attack occurred, Yusuf Kaymak told CTV News: “I ran out, and after we went outside, there was a kid that was stabbed. He was bleeding [from] his arm. I don’t know what happened to the professor.”
An hour and a half after police arrived on the scene, the university announced there was “no further threat to our campus community” on Twitter. Hagey Hall was vacated and closed for the rest of the day, reopening for classes on Thursday at 7am.
Mr Manning told reporters at the press conference, the university’s priority – in addition to supporting the ongoing police inquiry – is supporting the mental health of students and staff members.
Mental health counsellors were reportedly on the scene at Hagey Hall and other areas on-campus to assist those impacted by the attack.
“Our entire community is really concerned that this would happen here. It’s a big shock,” Mr Manning told reporters.
Emergency alert failures
The university’s emergency notification system WatSAFE, was tested on Wednesday, before the attack occurred. According to the student newspaper, one of WatSafe’s intended purposes is to alert community members about campus emergencies. However, several people complained that they didn’t receive an extremey delayed notification about the security breach.
Canada University Stabbing— (The Canadian Press)
A staff member, James M Skidmore shared a screenshot of a WatSAFE notification on Twitter, and captioned it: “The WatSAFE app’s first alert about the University of Waterloo #uwaterloo stabbing incident – about 90 minutes after I saw SWAT police run by me on campus.”
“Emergency communications @UWaterloo in the immediate aftermath of this horrific knife attack was a disaster. We received no messaging on the “WatSAFE app” - which was apparently tested *earlier today* before the attack,” another professor, Emmett Macfarlane tweeted.
He also decried the lack of coordinated communication from the university in the aftermath of the attack, reporting that several graduate students said “that they never received *any* notification that there was an attack on campus”.
“Had they not been on Twitter, they’d still not know anything had even happened,” Mr Macfarlane wrote.
When asked about the emergency notification system failures, Mr Manning told reporters: “We need to take a look again at our emergency notifications systems, of course.
“In any incident, the first thought for anybody involved is the immediate preservation of life and the security response, which is where the focus was today.”
‘Everything feels very unsafe’
While police have not commented on the attacker’s motive, academics and faculty members at the University of Waterloo have expressed their concerns that the gender issues class was targeted.
Politics professor at Arcadia University tweeted: “Earlier today, a man burst into a classroom at the University of Waterloo and demanded to know what the course was about. He then drew two knives from his jacket and began to stab the prof. The course was Philosophy of Gender.”
An associate professor at the University of Waterloo, Aimée Morrison tweeted that, if it is true the class was singled out because of its topic, “then this is an ideologically driven hate crime. And it will need to be addressed as such.”
