Dive Brief:

• Jon Meis, a Seattle Pacific University student who was working as a building monitor, likely stopped Thursday’s campus shooting incident from claiming more victims.
• The suspect, 26-year-old Aaron Ybarra, is accused of shooting three students with a shotgun, killing one and critically wounding another. Ybarra was carrying extra shotgun shells and a knife, indicating “he was hell-bent on a killing a lot of people,” a source told The Seattle Times.
• Meis pepper-sprayed the shooter as he was reloading, and then put him in a chokehold as other students and faculty helped hold him down until police arrived.

Dive Insight:

According to video interviews posted to The Seattle Times' website, Seattle Pacific — a Christian school with 4,000 students — had a communication system in place that informed students and staff of a lockdown via text messaging, as well as reader boards featured on clocks in campus buildings. While the university has had lockdowns in place over the last two years, the last four years have seen only 14 violent crimes recorded by police in the university area: seven threats, six assaults, and one robbery.