A Florida SWAT team swarmed a college campus Tuesday after an unconfirmed report of a Muslim with a gun in a stairwell, evacuating classrooms and the library, searching every room for an hour before they determined the campus was safe from terror.
But then one cop fired his weapon, leaving a bullet hole in the roof of his patrol car.
University of Central Florida police said that it was all done in the name of safety.
According to News 6:
“This is what we train for. Our officers train for thousands and thousands of hours every year from crisis de-escalation to active shooters, and that training kicked into high gear today,” Courtney Gilmartin, public information officer for the UCF Police Department, told News 6.
Just as the library was cleared, News 6 was on the scene when a police officer accidentally discharged his rifle, firing a single gunshot.
“One of the officers was getting ready to leave the scene and he went to secure his gun in the rack in his car — it’s a security measure we all take here — and something happened. The gun accidentally discharged,” Gilmartin said. “Nobody was hurt and we’re going to look into the source, whether it was malfunction of the weapon or a problem with the rack.”
Beary said that the bullet hit the roof of the officer’s vehicle. The officer has more than 30 years of law enforcement experience.
The initial report, which was made on social media, prompted campus police to send out the following text alert.
But that report raised concerns with some students because the alleged suspect was described as a person from the Middle East holding a gun, but it was not clear if the suspect was a man or a woman.
It is now believed the suspect was a Muslim woman praying in the stairwell with a Koran in her hand.
The local media was on campus interviewing students when the Florida cop fired his gun as you can see at 1:37 in the video below.
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