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At 12:43 p.m. a person called the administrative line of the Virginia Tech Police Department reporting what they thought sounded like gunfire. Officers arrived on the scene at 12:46 p.m. and immediately secured Pritchard Hall, which is an all-male dorm. Students were not allowed in or out of the building as officers started a room-by-room search of the dorm.

A Virginia Tech employee told EverythingNRV that he received the first VT text alert on his cell phone at 1:56 p.m. advising hm of the incident at Pritchard Hall.

As officers from various agencies throughout the New River Valley, officers and K-9 units started their search.

Police said that eyewitnesses reported seeing people, possibly students, exploding firecrackers or something else in or near a dumpster near Pritchard.

Boomer, a police K-9 from the Virginia Tech Police Department, keyed in on a set of dumpsters located outside of Pritchard Hall and across the street from an on-going campus construction site and Officers found cartridges from powder-actuated nailers, which are used on construction sites, inside the dumpster.

Virginia Tech officials believe that may have been the source of the suspicious noise, as they noted that their search inside the dorm did not turn up anything, nor was there any evidence of residual smell of gunpowder inside the dorm.

Police theorize that someone mechanically exploded the construction shells possibly by slamming the lid of a trash bin near the residence hall, according to a Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker.

Photo: (Top left) Officers search a dumpster outside of Virginia Tech’s Pritchard Hall Thursday afternoon. (Photo by David Grimes)

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