On Sunday, April 16, 2023, Hamilton students saw a post on the anonymous social media app, Jodel: “I want to shoot up KJ.” One student quickly showed the post to Campus Safety, who notified Campus Safety Director Frank Coots. A four-hour shelter-in-place followed, after which campus was secured, but a crucial communications error led to many students fearing for their lives during those four hours: a campus alert message indicated that there was an active shooter rather than a threat. During the lockdown, students hid in classrooms and peed in cups–one hunkered down in a closet. Armed police officers secured KJ and the surrounding buildings, patting students down along the way. By the time of the all-clear, campus had been secured and perpetrator Peter Ashby Howard III was arrested shortly after, but for many, trauma had set in, fears were awakened and a sense of security was shattered.

Despite no bullets being fired, the ugly shadow of gun violence hangs over the event. Guns are so destructive, shootings in America so frequent, that the very possibility of the threat being credible brought about a four-hour lockdown.

Although locks have been added to doors and more than seven months have passed, the event remains a painful reminder to many students of the constant threat of gun violence in the United States. In this oral history, students and staff reflected on their thoughts, fears and feelings brought

about by the events of April 16.

I: “This was the first time all year that I

had studied in KJ.”

Isa Cardoso ’25:

That was April 16, which is my birthday. It was the opening weekend of Rent, in which I was playing Mimi.

Hadley Noonan ’25:

It was kind of a normal Sunday. It was near the end of the semester, so things were just starting to wrap up. I’d been in KJ basically all day, just doing homework. Around 4 p.m., I had a sorority meeting. It was supposed to be an hour long.

Cole Kuczek ’23:

Before the response came in, I was working in the OCC, in KJ, since I was on shift that night.

Cardoso:

I got out of rehearsal and met up with a friend to study in KJ, because I had a lot of work to do. I was really behind. We sat in one of the study rooms that has the glass facing McEwen–which we rarely ever get. This was the first time all year that I had studied in KJ. I never study

in KJ. Until that day.

Campus Safety Director Frank Coots:

I was notified by the campus safety officer working dispatch. He had texted me the photograph of the Jodel post. You have that moment when you try to rationalize things, and you’re like, ‘this doesn’t mean anything!’ And then I realize, ‘no, this is a threat to the campus, and I was hired to keep the campus safe.’ We literally have a button in campus safety, and you push it for an emergency. I said, ‘you push that button.’

New York State Police Captain Jason Place:

I was the incident commander for this event. My wife is an Assistant Dean — she was notified and mentioned it to me. I also saw a Kirkland PD car go lights and siren past my house towards the College at about the same time.

Noonan:

The message they sent made it sound like someone had pulled one of those blue light things on campus. For some reason, the way they worded it, I kind of thought of something like that — someone had seen something, or been approached in a way that made them uncomfortable, so we were precautionarily staying in place.

Coots:

We notified everyone for shelter-in-place. That is the one and only thing that we do. We don’t go to lockdown, we don’t go to lockout, we don’t go to run away, we don’t do any of that. We simply say, ‘shelter in place. We need you to be as safe as possible in the environment in which you’re located. If you’re outside, get inside. I don’t care where you go. If you’re

not on campus, don’t come back to campus. If you’re in a building, if you’re in a classroom, if you’re in your dorm room, lock the door. Barricade the door.’

Place:

I ordered my personnel to the scene, spoke with Director of Campus

Safety, Frank Coots, on the phone, notified my superior, then suited up and responded.

Cardoso:

We got the text first, that was like, ‘shelter in place. Get away from windows.’ And we were like, ‘shit, this isn’t a great spot to be in!’ We just assumed that it was a tornado warning sort of thing. We grab all our stuff, with a sense of urgency but not fearing for our lives. We start booking it, and we’re like, ‘the safest place to be right now if there’s a tornado is KJ basement.’ We’re speed-walking to the stairs to go to the basement, and we look out the window, and it’s perfectly clear outside.

II: “There are things that no college kid

should be asked to think about.”

Ethan Daves ’23:

When I was walking past Opus [FoJo Beans], we got the text saying, ‘active shooter, go to the nearest building.’ Of course I didn’t want to go into Opus, because it’s just open windows. So I went into KJ.

Cardoso:

My friend and I were both RAs, so we were getting texts in our RA group chat that somebody had threatened to ‘shoot up KJ’ on Jodel. And when we saw those texts, we started getting really afraid.

Daves:

It definitely got a lot more stressful when they sent the text out that

said [the perpetrator] threatened KJ. [The stress] didn’t really go down until they sent out the text that was, ‘a threat of shooting,’ not an active shooter. I think that’s an incredibly huge distinction that they just didn’t make for a long time.

Coots:

We made a mistake. Of course we have boilerplate messages. We modify the body of the report, but unfortunately we forgot to modify the subject of the message, and it said ‘active shooter on campus,’ and it should have said, ‘threat of violence on campus.’

Lelan O’Brien ’23:

The text about the active shooter was a guttural and traumatizing experience. I was less than two weeks away from commemorating the two-year anniversary of losing my father

and family friend, who were killed by a mentally ill former employee on April 28, 2021. At the time, it sent my hometown of Watertown, New York into a lockdown and active shooter situation of their own, until their killer was found three hours later.

Noonan: Over time, we got so many texts. Every time they send you a text, they also call you, so we were just inundated with messages. They got more and more severe. I can’t really remember the sequence of it. But at first, it was like, ‘there is a threat on campus,’ and then it was, ‘there is an active shooter in KJ.’

O’Brien:

I remember receiving the text at the exact same time as my friend, we read it simultaneously and I’ll never forget the look on her face, having gone through the loss of my father with me just two years before. I remember she asked if I was okay, and we then both kind of stood up at the same time to leave the store. I remember pretty dramatically crying and storming out of the store, and then my supportive friend offering to drive.

Coots:

We keep sending you a message until you acknowledge that you’ve received it. Most people don’t realize that they have to acknowledge it. You don’t have to do it, but you’re gonna keep getting the message until you acknowledge that you received it. So as you can imagine, I keep sending you the message, it says ‘active shooter on campus,’ you don’t ac- knowledge it, and it keeps coming! ‘There must be some truth to this! I keep getting told this!’ We have since recognized that that’s an issue. We have to be very careful about what we send out.

Noonan:

It was hard to know what was really going on, because there weren’t any adults. It’s not like we were in a class or anything, so we were just fending for ourselves.

Place:

Colleges are a unique challenge in these types of events. You have to combat a lot of misinformation being generated especially over social media both with on campus residents and concerned family and friends who are far away off campus. Communications can become very congested and unclear when 911 centers and campus dispatches become overwhelmed with non-essential communications.

Cardoso:

If this person was on Jodel, and this person called the building

‘KJ,’ it was a student. All students have access to all residence halls until a certain time in the evening. So I could have gone in [to my residence hall], and a person with the intent to shoot me could have gone in

right behind me.

Noonan:

We were in this classroom where the doors opened the opposite way. Instead of pulling a closet door open, it pushes in. So you couldn’t lock them, which was an issue. And because they were backwards, you couldn’t really put any- thing against it, because it opened the other way.

Cardoso:

We tried locking the doors, we couldn’t lock the doors. The chairs in the KJ basement are bolted to the floor, so there was no way to block both doors.

Kuczek:

I remember closing and locking the OCC door, and texting my friends to see where they were. Once they announced it was an active shooter, everyone in the OCC went into the conference room, put down the shades and barricaded the doors. Since the main room is all glass

we had to leave there.

Noonan:

There were 25 of us [in the room], probably, and then two or three girls who had been in the atrium who were told to find a classroom who just ran in. We didn’t know them, really. It was definitely tough, people were reacting very differently. It was scary for everyone, obviously, but some people were really much more upset than others.

Place:

The college community and the students did take this event seriously and did what they were instructed to, which really helped us move much faster in securing the campus and getting everyone back to their normal activity. The College did well communicating over multiple information streams in a timely manner and working with the police to share information. This is not an everyday event. I also know that they are constantly looking to improve their response capability, as are we.

Associate Vice President of Student Affairs Jeff Landry:

As horrifying as the situation was, students did exactly what was needed: sheltered in place, were cooperative with the officers who were searching the buildings and most importantly, took care of each other during and after the incident.

Coots:

We learned a lot of things that day, like that some of our classroom

doors could not be locked. We’ve since fixed that, so every classroom door on this campus can be locked. That was important, and it should have been done before, but in a perfect world, we’d have all these things

done.

Noonan:

We were kind of like, ‘all right. If something’s gonna happen, it’s

gonna happen, because there’s literally nothing we can do to protect ourselves.’ In those classrooms, all the furniture is kind of bolted down, so there was nothing we could have moved anyway. It felt like no one from the school had considered all the things that could go wrong in a situation

like this.

Professor of Philosophy Alexandra Plakias:

I’ve heard from students who were in rooms, making plans for how to fight the person if they came into the room, or what they were going to do. At a certain point, there are things that no college kid should be asked to think about. No adult. Nobody.

Cardoso:

We sat for a little while thinking that it would be safest to just stay

where we were, but we just kept hearing more and more people running by KJ basement, and a group of girls was running, and they opened the door to the classroom really fast. We saw the group of girls, and that was really scary, and we were like, ‘we have to leave.’ We got our stuff together. We were speed-walking, but then eventually started jogging, and it was weird the way our bodies just kept getting faster and faster.

Kuczek:

Once I was sitting down in the conference room, having my friends and maybe my mom text me wondering what was going on was quite scary. Because I had no idea if the situation was real or not. I also remember laying down at one point to get below the window and thinking if what was going on was really happening.

Coots:

Nature calls. And they have to take care of having to urinate. ‘I’m trying to be small, I’m trying to be quiet, but I really have to pee.’ So you’re going to pee in a cup. You’re going to make sure that you are not drawing attention to you at all.

Caroline Hogan ’26:

When the police came, I honestly think that was the

scariest part for me.

Noonan:

Probably an hour and a half into the whole thing, someone was banging on the door and was like, ‘FBI! Is anyone in here?’ People were kind of fighting, like, ‘no, we can’t, you’re not meant to let someone in. If it’s FBI, they just come in.’ Finally, someone was like, ‘yeah, we’re in here.’ They came in. Five men with bomb jackets — whatever they’re called — and huge guns came in. We all had to put our hands up, and they patted each of us down.

Hogan:

There were three men, and they all had massive guns. It was very,‘whoa.’ I don’t know what the type of gun was, but it was certainly scary. They pat us down. They were very nice, very ‘everything’s all right.’ Reassuring. But it was very scary.

Coots:

The threat was specifically to Kirner-Johnson, KJ. Law enforcement’s approach is that they have to secure the building. Sometimes they dynamically enter a classroom. When a room is entered dynamically, there’s a lot of confusion. It’s very loud, it’s very confusing, and it’s very intimidating. Those students had to live through that. They are literally putting their hands up. It is like television. You are putting your hands up because you don’t want to get shot.

Cardoso:

We run out to the very end of Shambach, closest to Root, because we had a friend who was in her dorm there. We went to the furthest end where the stairs were, and we went up the stairs as quietly as we could, and I went in front of my friend. I’m doing the whole thing with my arms out in front of her. I peek my head out, and there’s a kid, just walking, with AirPods in and a black hoodie on. I was like, ‘this is it.’

And he just kept walking. I was frozen in front of this kid. Because he was just walking as if he didn’t know anything that was happening. There were alarms playing over every one of the speakers on campus, and

yet this kid just has his AirPods in and a black hoodie and is just walking. I scanned his entire body to see if there was something that was going to hurt me, but no. And then I felt like a horrible person, like, ‘damn, this kid is just walking, and I think he’s going to shoot me!’ He walks past, I look at my friend, and I’m like, ‘we just have to run now.’

Plakias:

Part of what makes incidents like the one that happened so scary is that of course you would think that something’s actually happening. It doesn’t seem implausible.

Cardoso:

Again, we start with a speed-walk, then once we get to the door

to run outside from Shambach to Root, we just start sprinting. And we’re, like, laughing as we’re running. Even though we are so afraid. We are literally running for our lives, but we’re laughing.

Coots:

We were updating everyone through our mass notification system, but it wasn’t like we were saying, ‘now we’re entering classroom 101 in Kirner-Johnson.’ It wasn’t like that. It was just, ‘we’re continuing the search, and we expanded the search to go from KJ to McEwen to KTSA to Shambach.’ That whole complex was searched. And it takes some time. Even with three law enforcement teams searching, it takes a lot of time.

Place:

Incidents like this require a large number of resources to efficiently and effectively resolve them. Many people may not realize that just because an incident like this is occurring, other issues arise simultaneously. They may be in the surrounding area, like domestic incidents, robberies, burglaries, or localized. For instance, in this event we had a student with a medical emergency in the dining hall while this was going on that necessitated an ambulance response.

Daves:

The state police came by. They got a bunch of us and put us in one

of the professors’ offices up there and then locked the door, so that way we were in a more secure area. We spent an hour or two in there while they were sweeping.

“I’ve heard from students who were in rooms, making plans for how to fight the person if they came into the room, or what they were going to do. At a certain point, there are things that no college kid should be asked to think about. No adult. Nobody.”- Professor Alexandra Plakias

Coots:

We worked with the state police, the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office, the Kirkland Police, the FBI, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, they were all here on campus. We had, I’d say, somewhere between 20 and 25 police officers on campus in a short amount of time. We were able to react, manage, and then finally remove the threat from our campus.

Place:

The New York State Police, Kirkland PD, Oneida Sheriff’s Department, Encon Police and an FBI agent who lives locally responded. Everyone did an excellent job integrating and following orders.

Coots:

Our HERT team, we meet once a month. Even though it’s, ‘what could you possibly talk about?’ But it’s so we can react properly and in a timely fashion, so we’re properly trained, we know what resources are available. If you say, ‘we’re going to do it once a year,’ you’re not ready to go.

Noonan:

It was really scary, and really frustrating, because it felt like the school just had not really thought about all the things that could go wrong. It seemed like we were in the worst possible building, because I’ve never really been in another classroom that has those weird doors and has the bolted-down furniture. It was kind of awful.

Coots:

You have to be a special person to know where you’re going in KTSA. So it’s not as simple as law enforcement showing up and I flip them the keys. What I did is, I had three campus safety officers, who are unarmed — we do not carry guns on this campus — put them in bulletproof vests, and then they were assigned to one of these three law enforcement teams. Because, first of all, they needed to know where to go. Not that they needed to unlock doors, but some of them, the way our locking system works, sometimes it’s a card swipe, sometimes it’s a key, sometimes you need to jostle the door a little bit to get it open. And the people who know that are the Campus Safety Officers.

Hogan:

They sent us an all-clear message. We were kind of emotionally drained. We were freshmen, so we didn’t really have cars on campus. But my friend had brought up her car, and we went to Burger King.

Cardoso:

As soon as we got that text, we ordered Taco Bell [laughs].

Coots:

I did get some pushback from some of the students about the perpetrator. Why did we go to an all-clear without the perpetrator in custody? Because there had been a short time period between the all-clear where you can resume normal duties and activities and the person actually being placed in handcuffs. But we also knew who it was, and [law enforcement] were able to put surveillance on this person while they were developing enough probable cause to make an arrest.

O’Brien:

I think very highly of Frank Coots, and I did witness many improvements in campus safety over my four years at Hamilton. He is a standup campus partner, and true ally on campus. I do believe that they will learn from this experience and hopefully such a slip up like the incorrect message won’t happen again. I also was happy to see the quick implementation of putting locks on the doors of the KJ classrooms. I did wonder if there was an assessment of what other things Hamilton has overlooked, such as the lockless doors, that makes us more vulnerable to an active shooter.

Coots:

Roughly speaking, it was about four hours from notification to conclusion.

III: “I didn’t go to class. Couldn’t go to

class.”

Coots:

We were able to identify the perpetrator because of students’ actions. The students of this college took it extremely seriously. They wanted, first of all, to be safe, but when they were able to give information to identify the perpetrator, they did that too, without hesitation.

Noonan:

Everyone was affected by it, on and off campus. A lot of my friends were in a lab in the Science Center for hours. People were in the Commons basement, or were locked in their room and couldn’t get to the bathroom. It went on until 9:30 p.m. on a Sunday, and I had a 9:00 a.m on Monday. It was kind of like, ‘really? Is this what we’re trying to do here?’ Some of my friends are tour guides, and Admis- sions was super adamant on giving tours that day, because they wanted to show that Hamilton was resilient and that the campus could come together.

Landry:

Everybody responds to stress in a different way but I thought getting back to the structure of a typical class day was important. And, equally important was the understanding of faculty and staff to allow students to manage their stress and anxiety the way that worked best for them — which, in some cases, resulted in students missing class to take care of themselves.

Cardoso:

I didn’t go to class. Couldn’t go to class.

Hogan:

There’s not one proper way to handle something like that, in the aftermath. For some people, what they needed was for everything to go back to normal, and other people needed time. I get what the administration was trying to do, in that they resumed classes, and for some people, that was what they needed. But I do think they should have enforced that professors get rid of assignments for the week, or something like that. I also heard that a lot of people were talking about whether their

professors acknowledged it at all.

O’Brien:

The decision to not cancel classes the next day I found to be quite abysmal. The reasoning of how others cope better with routine I thought was a bit tone-deaf. Others who cope as such could easily have chosen to go to an on campus study space, and completed homework during the

day. I also think this group was largely in the minority. I don’t think folks would have complained about a day off.

Noonan:

That morning, I remember being in FoJo on dark side, and it was just so eerie being there. Everyone knew that this had happened, obviously, and experienced it in varying ways, but there was just nothing being done, really.

Plakias:

I know for a fact that professors were very concerned about how to support their students, and whether or not there was an official policy, I know professors were very willing to do whatever it took to help their students get through it. But at the same time, as professors, we’re

not mental health professionals.

Kuczek:

I think a lot of my professors were very kind about assignments that week and also checked in with us about how we were doing. I remember Amy Gaffney, the OCC director, was especially kind and

compassionate for those that were working there during the incident.

Counseling Center Director David Walden:

Some students felt relieved that it was only a threat and felt comforted by the support of family and friends. Other students felt a great deal of fear–even re- ferring to it as “the shooting”–and needed deeper support around what it brought up. In the Counseling Center, we were there to listen and support no matter what a student’s experience and we were happy to do it in the ways that we could.

Landry:

There was a wide variety of reactions. For many, the stress and anxiety carried on for days, weeks, or more. There was certainly an uptick in the use of our support services.

Dani Bernstein ’24:

Campus was dead. You can feel the general vibes on

campus shift through the semester. People get stressed around finals, and right before breaks people are exhausted. The genuine vibe around campus was grief.

Plakias:

I know a lot of people had thoughts about the administration’s decision not to cancel classes or whatever, but at a certain point, there are days when I think no one should go to school again until we fix this. Why are we still doing this and pretending like it’s okay when it’s not?

Hogan:

Everyone was looking into [the perpetrator’s] life, and looking into

who he was, and what he was involved with on campus. People were obsessed with who he was. Making assumptions, for sure. Everyone was like, ‘oh my god, he’s from Kentucky, he must be so conservative,

he must not understand how fucked up this whole thing is.’ People made assumptions about him, but I think his actions can imply a certain thing about his character.

Coots:

The [perpetrator] was still a student here. As an administrator, I always have to be careful that I don’t reveal too much information that violates their sense of privacy, their confidentiality, and that I’m not violating any type of educational laws. I had conversations with them. I was with them a lot the next day. They were embarrassed. I think that’s a fair word to use. It was something really stupid they said. I have yet to meet a person on the face of this earth that has not said something stupid

in their life. We all say stupid things, we all say things that we regret. Unfortunately, some of them reach a level where it is inexcusable. And I think in this situation they had to be held accountable. They have to

be, because it disrupted so many lives, it used so many resources. And I still think that there are people who it affects to this day.

Hogan:

I know he dropped out of school before he could get expelled, so I don’t know anything about the consequences he’ll face with the school. I don’t want to say he doesn’t deserve a second chance, because I don’t know him, I don’t know if he’s the kind of person who’s going to grow from this, or think that he’s been wronged by getting in trouble. I don’t know anything about him and how he reacted. But I really hope that he- [pauses] I literally can’t get over how fucking stupid you have to be to

post something like that.

Plakias:

I think there was a lot of focus on Jodel. This problem existed for a long time before Jodel, and even if we got rid of Jodel, it would still be there. People have been making threats for a long time.

Cardoso:

I try not to [think about it]. It’s easier that way, I think. I’ve definitely gotten a lot better about going through the spaces I was in at the time without feeling this intense dread.

O’Brien:

I think my most specific memory of that time was my panic and retraumatization from receiving that text inthat smoothie shop. I honestly don’t think I would go back there because of how sad and scary that was for me as a victim of gun violence.

“I literally can’t get over how fucking stupid you have to be to post something like that.” — Caroline Hogan ’26

Place:

I suspect each student had their own unique feelings and experience. I would suspect some students couldn’t care less about the incident and viewed it as a bother. I also suspect some students were

likely traumatized by the event and maybe it’s still impacting them.

Coots:

I still have it. I still have the message. It angers me. First of all, that it happened here. It doesn’t happen here. I’m not naive. I spent 34 years of my life in law enforcement, and I’ve seen a lot of things, and I’ve been involved with mass shootings. I’m not naive. But I come here, and I want it to be safe, and I started this conversation by saying I feel like I let people down because I could not ensure that that wasn’t going to happen on our campus. As much as I wanted to say, ‘it’ll never happen here!’ I knew in my mind and in my heart that absolutely, it could happen here. And it did happen here.

IV: “We’re reacting to violence as op-

posed to preventing violence.”

Plakias:

When I was a high school senior and there was the first [school] shooting — maybe not the first ever, but the first to really break into public awareness — it was such a shocking thing. It felt like a shocking aberration. It didn’t feel like something that could happen to you any day, at any time. And now it feels like something we’ve been asked to learn to live with.

Hogan:

Personally, politically, I will never understand when people blame it on mental health. Guns can be controlled. I come from a background where no one close to me owns a gun, so I don’t view it as a value. And I know that that’s different for people across the U.S., so I can’t speak on people’s reasoning. But I can’t fathom how people don’t want to change regulations and prevent people who shouldn’t have guns from having guns.

Plakias:

There’s a pickup truck sometimes I see at my kids’ school parking lot. It has a bumper sticker on it that says ‘Fuck Cuomo,’ but the “k” is an automatic weapon. And I’m like, ‘this is a kids’ school. Do you really believe that your kid is safer because of automatic weapons?’

Coots:

As Americans, we’re reacting to violence as opposed to preventing violence.

Hogan:

My friend from home goes to UVA. A student killed three football players. I went to visit her during spring break, and just off campus at a bar, there was a shooting, that night I was with her. Obviously terrifying, but to watch her and all of her floormates, even though we were in the

dorm, react to what was happening — they were freaking out. They had experienced real trauma. That all happened twice to my friend, to her community. Even though I personally knew very soon into the whole

experience that we were safe, it was kind of like, ‘this actually could’ve happened, and can actually happen at any time.’

Bernstein:

There was a shooting at my sister’s school a couple months ago, where maybe 16 to 20 people passed away in that general area. It’s horrifying that this violence is all around us and is so normalized.

Plakias:

It’s been, what, twenty years plus since Columbine? It’ll be 25 years next year. We should have dealt with it right there. But when Columbine happened, people wanted to blame video games, people wanted to blame…I don’t know, Satanic music. We ignored the fact that there was a very obvious reason why it happened, which was the availability of guns. And now 25 years later, it’s happening all the time, we’ve completely failed to solve the problem, and we’ve just asked

you guys to accept lockdown drills, and at the same time, we kind of bemoan your need for mental health accommodations.

O’Brien:

If there is anything we learned from this event, it would be that a mass shooting is completely capable of happening on the Hill. It’s becoming a reality of living in America, and being prepared for it in any way we can should be investigated.

Plakias:

It’s something that I think about that could happen any day, every day when I give my kids a kiss. That’s outrageous.

Cardoso:

At the start of the summer, I was home, and my mom was like, ‘oh, no! There was a shooting on the beach.’ There’s a boardwalk at the beach near my house that I would go to all the time as a kid with my friends. I couldn’t quite drive yet, but some of my friends could, so we would all go to this one place and eat pizza and play Truth or Dare. So she says, ‘oh no, there was a shooting on the beach, right on this spot where you used to hang out all the time.’ I froze, and I couldn’t say anything back, and I just started crying. Just because of the realization that you can’t really escape violence no matter where you are.

Plakias:

There have been so many breaking points. Sandy Hook. There have been so many inflection points where it seemed like surely, something has to give now. Surely, something has to change. And it never does.

Coots:

My right to live should not take a backseat to someone’s right to pos-

sess a firearm.

Interviews have been condensed for clarity.