“Gunman on campus. Shelter in place immediately,” read a succinct warning posted atop UNCW’s homepage shortly after midnight on Monday. At 11:58 p.m. Monday night, a person in the parking lot of the Hardee’s on College Acres Drive was reportedly robbed at gunpoint, with the gunman then fleeing the scene onto campus. Early reports indicated that no shots were fired.  Police cars, dogs and a helicopter were quickly mobilized in pursuit of the gunman, and UNCW was placed on an emergency lockdown.

Students in nearby Randall Library, alerted via mass text and email from UNCW Police Department, quickly began gathering near the entrance, some hoping to be allowed to go home, others stirred by curiosity. Faces read from concern to amusement, with others buried in their cell phones, scanning repeatedly for updates. City police quickly lost the trail near the pathway onto campus from behind the Hardees, and after about 25 minutes local police officially “lifted the perimeter,” allowing students to return to their homes, but recommending that they exercise caution and at the very least travel in pairs. Elsewhere, campus was predictably quiet in Tuesday’s early morning hours, save for the increased police car presence and the overhead drone of a helicopter.

The momentarily excited atmosphere of an otherwise quiet Monday night at Randall Library fairly died off by 1 a.m., and the building began to empty out as usual. In a predictable case of addictive behavior trumping rationality, the more nicotine-dependent among the students were some of the first to venture out.

“I’m not too worried. [The gunman] doesn’t have any reason to go around shooting people; he just robbed someone and is trying to get away,” reasoned one student.  Indeed, most library-goers by that point had made the assumption, evidently echoed by the lifting of the campus lockdown that the suspect had likely gotten away and wouldn’t be hanging around unnecessarily. Students normally disrupted by the new library hours caught a slight break, as the librarian on duty kept the library open later for those students who preferred to not take the risk, but by 2:30 a.m. campus police arrived to escort any worried students to their cars or homes.

Crime within the area along the northern border of campus is hardly new.  In an interview conducted prior to recent municipal elections, then-city council candidate and former Wilmington Police Lieutenant Matthew Hinson shed light on one potential reason for the higher crime-rate around campus. “Areas like Campus Edge and Campus Walk, where you have that area of high crime right next to campus, that wasn’t there before UNCW instituted their one-mile radius for parking,” Hinson said. “That used to be almost all student housing.”

According to Hinson, a Wilmington Police veteran of over 25 years, UNCW’s policy of denying on-campus parking during class hours to students living within a mile of campus caused housing demand in affected areas along Racine Avenue to drop drastically. Students began relocating further away from campus in order to be able to drive their cars to and from, effectively turning nearby residential areas such as Campus Edge, Campus Walk and Brookstone Apartments into lower-income housing.

Students unfamiliar with the area prior to moving into those complexes have often found that violent and drug-related crime is unusually higher immediately off campus than most of the surrounding housing complexes past the one-mile mark.

Hinson went on, saying that Wilmington PD had “tried telling them what would happen if they imposed the radius, but [UNCW] went ahead with it anyways, and they ended up with what we had predicted.”