A shooting at the Park East Student Living Apartments pool put two people in the hospital, and had many more people scrambling for safety.
On Monday, the apartment addressed safety concerns their residents had after the shooting.
Anthony Frazier, the marketing manager for the complex, said it was a warm day on Saturday, so the pool was more crowded. He has a view of the pool from his apartment, which he said looked to be at about half-capacity minutes before the incident.
When shots were fired, both he and the on-campus officer responded immediately, he said. Officer Garza, the on-campus officer, is a deputy for the Lubbock County Sheriff’s Office.
“Garza was able to begin assessing the situation and applied aid to one of the victims,”
Frazier said. “Basically, we began assisting authorities.”
Residents got a message to their phone a couple hours after the incident, and an e-mail debriefing them the following day. Many of them were concerned, wishing they had received a message as soon as it happened.
“It would have been nice if they had given us more of a heads up because I know I was planning on going to the gym at that time and the gym is right next to the pool,” said Aryana Manoo, a resident. “If that would have occurred around that time, who knows what could have happened.”
Since authorities had not found Jackson, Garza and Frazier said their priority was locating him to ensure no further harm was done to the victims and all other residents.
“In this particular incident, because we were so involved with helping the authorities afterwards, the response time, in terms of getting info out to our residents, took longer than we would have liked,” he said.
In the future, he said they will look towards a system that sends out responses quicker.
He said the apartment complex also has extensive security to keep residents safe.
“We have two courtesy officers that live on-site and they were obviously instrumental in helping making sure the damage and impact here was minimalized,” he said.
They have hundreds of cameras and electronic gates that lock, he added. However, after a meeting held with the residents to debrief them and hear their concerns, Frazier said they will also be implementing more security measures.
“We will implement a guest pass resident pass policy to assist with monitoring who is actually here on the property, as well as having increased security in the foreseeable future,” Frazier said.
After the incident, while the residents were concerned with the size of the crowd prior to the incident, they also acknowledged the difficulty in preventing random acts like this. Some believed the apartment complex responded to the situation the best they could.
“It sucked that it happened for things to change but nobody really predicts a shooting,” said Tanner Paulsen, a resident.
“Our primary concern is that the physical and mental well-being of our guest and our residents is taken care of first and foremost,” Frazier said.
Frazier said the university will have counseling services on Tuesday from 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Frazier said it was not an apartment event and neither the suspect or victims were residents at the apartment complex.
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