Bates College students tell of terrifying night amid chaos
Some slept in dining hall amid lockdown
‘Sandy Hook happened when I was in elementary school, so all of my life I have been preparing for this. I never thought I would have to use those skills.’
HANNAH ORTON,
Senior at Bates College
Bates College students described a harrowing Wednesday night as a mass shooting event unfolded near the school’s Lewiston campus and authorities told residents to shelter in place.
Dozens of students spent the night locked down in the library, dining hall, and classrooms while most students spent the night locked in their dorms, according to several students interviewed Thursday. College officials were coordinating shifts for students to pick up food at the dining hall while the lockdown continues, the students said.
“That was definitely quite terrifying and scary,” said Caleb Ireland, a recent Bates graduate who now works on campus as a research associate. “I spent a good amount of the night texting various students stuck due to the lockdown in various buildings on campus. I definitely didn’t get too much sleep.”
Bates canceled classes Thursday and Friday.
Tamrin Ghai, a sophomore from New York City, was rehearsing with her a cappella group on Wednesday night for a performance at the upcoming presidential inauguration, which was scheduled for the weekend but has since been postponed due to the shootings. Ghai said she went to the dining hall with friends after rehearsal when her phone buzzed with an emergency alert notifying her to shelter in place.
“I started hearing that they weren’t letting people leave the building around 8 p.m.,” Ghai said. “At that point, we thought OK, well if we are going to be here and locked down, we shouldn’t be in the bottom floor where windows are.”
Ghai said she and her friends used table cloths as blankets and slept on the floor until 3:50 a.m., when she woke up to another alert from the Bates emergency system saying the campus would stay in lockdown. A couple hours later, college officials started shuttling students back to their dorms. Ghai said it was a relief to be back in her dorm with her roommates. On Thursday, students tried to keep themselves occupied as they waited for news.
“Everyone was trying not to think about the actual things that were happening and just focusing on what they could control,” Ghai said. “One of my roommates has been playing guitar, which has been nice to hear.”
Trinity Poon, a sophomore from Sandwich, Mass., said that she was shopping for Halloween supplies at the Walmart in Auburn with friends Wednesday evening when the group started receiving texts from friends on campus asking if they had heard about a shooting. She spent the night in her dorm room in lockdown while her roommate was stuck in the dining hall.
“We are all kind of holding our breath,” Poon said.
Hannah Orton, a senior from Littleton, Mass., was also in the dining hall with teammates from the women’s club ice hockey team when the campus went into lockdown. She said she has anxiety and was very nervous about the prospect of the gunman coming to campus. She started thinking through what she learned from shooter drills at her public high school and how she would apply those strategies to Bates’s campus if necessary.
“Sandy Hook happened when I was in elementary school, so all of my life I have been preparing for this,” Orton said. “But I never thought I would have to use those skills.”
Orton ran back to her dorm around 5 a.m., she said, nervous she would be shot on the twominute run.