On Dec. 31, 2017, a former student of the University of Wyoming Law College, Matthew Riehl, shot and killed Douglas County Sheriff Deputy Zackari Parrish, while injuring four other law enforcement agents and two civilians in Douglas County, Colorado.
Last November, Riehl was also the reason for the increased security at the college of law.
According to the press release from the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department, they responded to a verbal disturbance call with a report that Riehl might be having a mental breakdown. They later returned after originally clearing the scene and that is when the suspect shot his victims.
“His Facebook postings were directed at current or former professors,” Lindsay Hoyt, assistant dean of the college of law, said. “Our concern was the Law school, we don’t deal with any of the other units on campus, but what we did do, in case they wanted to do something campus wide, was we told the general counsel, the UWPD and the provost’s office.”
On Nov. 6, Hoyt sent an email to faculty and staff warning them of the suspect and providing them with pictures of him and his car. A similar email was sent to students of the college of law, but with his name and picture redacted.
“We were honestly not concerned at that point that there was an imminent threat, but his Facebook posts were off,” Hoyt said. “So we wanted to make our students aware that we were aware of someone that, piqued, kind of hit our radar.”
Riehl’s Facebook posts were enough to increase security at the college of law.
“We obliged them [UWPD, general counsel and provost’s office] in making sure that we continue to monitor, from our end, the Facebook pages to see if it became more concerning,” Dean Klinton Alexander of the college of law said. “They [UWPD] took steps on campus to monitor the situation themselves and also locate this individual.”
Mike Samp, chief of police of UWPD, said they had located this individual and decreased the security at the college of law afterwards.
“The behavior being demonstrated was all social media,” Samp said. “There was concerning statements directed at faculty, in particular and generally about the law school.”
Samp said they focused on increasing security at the law school specifically because of the nature of the posts and how they related to specific members of the college of law faculty and the college of law itself.
“We have to always manage the need and right to know of our community with due process rights and privacy rights,” Samp said. “We try to balance those to the best interest and safety of our students and campus community.”
Custodial Supervisor Daryl Schultz said, “Just more information would have been awesome. The first I heard about it was when my custodians over there called me and said, ‘Hey, there are cops all over the building and there is a dog in here.’”
Schultz said he would have had his custodians change their routine if he had known earlier.
“That’s my one biggest complaints, is that we should have had more information so that I could at least had told my girl [custodian] to keep the building locked until cops arrived,” Schultz said.
Schultz’s supervisor eventually sent him an email, but that was after he had started asking why there was increased security.
“His [Riehl’s] total focus was the law school,” Chad Baldwin, associate vice president for communications and marketing, said. “Certainly, the Law College is in proximity to Fine Arts and Athletics, there was never any, and again, there was never any over threat.”
General Counsel Tara Evans was reached out to, but declined an interview, saying that they do not give interviews and referred other people to talk to.
