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The Daily Tar Heel

Parents told about stabbing before students

Assault alert was sent on parents listserv

Correction (Nov. 6 12:03 a.m.): Due to a reporting error, this story misstates who decided not to send text messages to students after the stabbing on Sunday morning. The emergency warning committee made this decision, as non-siren scenario policy dictates. The Daily Tar Heel apologizes for the error.

When a student was stabbed outside a fraternity house following Halloween festivities, an e-mail sent on several listservs left many parents more informed than their children.

The University posted a notice Sunday on the Alert Carolina Web site detailing the stabbing, which occurred early Sunday morning outside the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house. However, no e-mail was sent to students.

UNC spokesman Mike McFarland said no e-mail was sent to students because the University’s first priority was to gather information and updates on the stabbing from the Chapel Hill Police Department and publish posts on the Alert Carolina Web site.

McFarland said he regretted that an e-mail was not sent.

“In hindsight, it would have been better to have also sent a campus e-mail in conjunction with the Alert page postings,” he said.

McFarland added that the Office of New Student and Carolina Parent Programs, which frequently forwards e-mails to parents, assumed that a message had already been sent to the UNC community when it notified parents on several listservs.

“It was a good-faith gesture to keep parents informed based on the assumption that something already happened,” McFarland said.

Alert Carolina is designed to notify students about life-threatening on-campus situations through sirens and text messages. It has been used in the past to alert students of incidents such as sexual assaults and a campus bomb threat.

McFarland said the Department of Public Safety decided against sending text messages to students because the stabbing incident did not fill each of the three criteria used to determine whether a message is warranted.

Stephen James Howard, 19, of Ventura, Calif., was charged with assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury for the early morning stabbing of junior Taylor Inscoe. Inscoe was transported to UNC Hospitals after the incident and was released at about 7 a.m. the same morning.

McFarland said the system, now in its third year, is still developing.

“Every time one of these things happens, there is always something to be learned from it,” he said.



Assistant University Editor Andrew Harrell contributed reporting.

Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.

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