Graduate student Adam Halverson was on his way to the restroom in Willamette Hall on Thursday afternoon when several officers from the Department of Public Safety ushered him out of the way.
Halverson, who teaches physics on the second floor, later found out that a professor in the building had received a letter containing an unusual message and an unknown substance.
“I had just gotten out of a tutoring session. I didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “I wondered if it was an anthrax threat — it seems to be a prevailing fear for everyone nowadays. It just turned out to be real this time.”
But he added that he was pretty sure the threat was a hoax. Emeritus Physics Professor Bernd Crasemann, who received the threat, is also the editor for Physical Review A, a physics journal. Halverson said he suspects that the message was sent by a writer who could not get his work published in the journal.
“We think it was just a crackpot who keeps getting rejected,” he said.
Senior biochemistry major Ben Wiggins, who was in a lab in the basement of Willamette Hall at the time, said there were no signs anything was wrong until he left and saw the police. He later received an e-mail from Halverson about what had happened.
But he said he is not worried that the anthrax threat has reached the West Coast or the University campus.
“It sounded like a cheap prank,” he said. “I think someone is just piggy-backing on everyone’s fears. … But it didn’t sound like people were that worried. Everyone I talked to was pretty much like, ‘Oh well, if we got it, we’d take the antibiotics.’”
Adam Clausen, a graduate student who tutors physics lab sessions, was also in Willamette Hall during the time of the incident.
But he said the anthrax “scare” has gotten weary, and not even a campus threat fazed him.
“I wasn’t really surprised,” he said. “It mostly just made me tired to think about it. What’s the point of doing something like this?… It’s gotten so tiring.”
He added that even if the threat ends up being credible, the situation does not exactly leave him in shock.
“It’s not like I thought, ‘Oh man, I almost just died,’” he said.