On Wednesday, September 4, Quinnipiac University students, faculty and staff thought they were experiencing a simple fire drill, when the alarm cleared the Carl Hansen Student Center.

Caution tape, bomb squad and an anonymous post proved otherwise.

Here are the details of the event.

According to Quinnipiac University’s criminal recordPublic Safety received a call from a student shortly after 2 p.m. The student informed Public Safety of a post on the anonymous social media app, YikYak, that mentioned a pipe bomb in a women’s restroom in the student center. Two minutes later, the school notified Hamden police, according to the department daily log.

The post in question appears to have been made around 1:30 p.m

A fire alarm sounded shortly before 2:20 p.m. that evacuated the student center. Officers cleared the adjacent Tator Hall a moment later.

“At about 2:25 p.m. a police officer (I’m not sure if it was QU public safety or the Hamden police) opened the door and walked into my classroom and said, ‘You all need to evacuate the building due to an investigation,'” Melissa Gibbons, a part-time psychology professor who taught a class on the third floor of Tator, wrote in an email to The Chronicle.“Immediately, the students packed up and left the classroom.”

While nothing seemed out of the ordinary at first, public safety officials repeatedly asked students to move about 15 meters from the building as they ran off the area with caution tape.

Zack Marcario, a first-year health science major, was in class in Tator Hall when the building was evacuated, and said “everyone was just really confused.”

“We just thought it was a fire drill,” Marcario said. “I guess when we found out it was a bomb threat it became more serious.”

As a precaution, classes scheduled in Tator Hall were moved online for the remainder of the day. The rest of the academic buildings remained open and functional.

“We made decisions based on the information we had at the time,” Public Safety Director Otoniel Reyes said. “The threat that there was a pipe bomb was specific to that (area). We tried to minimize the unnecessary impact on the community. That’s one of the things that we decided (that) in the future we will expand it to (the rest of the campus ).”

About an hour later, New Haven’s bomb squad arrived on campus with four K-9s.

At 4:31 p.m., a QU Alert email informed students, faculty and staff that the building was cleared and deemed safe. All services inside resumed normal operation.

“Our officers went in, we did a visual inspection of the bathrooms to see if we saw anything that could look like a pipe bomb or anything out of place,” Reyes said. “(The New Haven bomb squad) came in and cleared the building.”

Unknown yet to the Quinnipiac community, at 4:50 p.m., Hamden Police arrested Nkemakonam Okafor, a 22-year-old Quinnipiac student in connection with the bomb threat.

According to the department’s Sept. 5 news release, Okafor admitted to posting the bomb threat online, which read “whoever is in the main office in the student center, don’t use the women’s bathroom, there’s a pipe bomb in there.”

“We evaluate every situation and every set of circumstances differently,” Reyes said. “We don’t always react to every post on social media. We make a decision that takes into account all the information and details we have for each situation.”

Okafor was charged with first-degree breach of peace, a Class B misdemeanor that carries a sentence of up to five years in prison, a maximum fine of $5,000 and probation.

Breach of peace in the first degree is notified when someone “with intent to cause nuisance, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly create a risk thereof, such person places a non-functioning imitation of an explosive or incendiary device or an imitation of a dangerous substance in a public place or in a place or manner likely to be discovered by another person”, according to Justia law.

Quinnipiac President Judy Olian announced just after 6 p.m. that a suspect in the case had been “arrested.”

“Our emergency planning, along with fantastic cooperation between Public Safety and Hamden Police, resulted in a quick resolution,” Olian wrote in a university-wide email.

“We worked with the social media company, we worked with our IT department, we worked with local government,” Reyes said. “Our primary goal was to try to determine if this was a credible threat and we wanted to make sure there wasn’t a more widespread concern for us to worry about.”

Okafor graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Quinnipiac’s School of Computing and Engineering in May.

John Morgan, Quinnipiac’s associate vice president for public relations, declined to comment further.

Okafor was released after posting a $10,000 bond.

His arraignment is scheduled for Sept. 20 in Meriden Superior Court.

This wasn’t the first bomb scare Quinnipiac has faced. The last was during commencement in 2014, when a former student called in a bomb threat to interrupt the ceremony to hide her dropping out in front of her parents.

“It’s not something that happens often,” Reyes said. “I wouldn’t say it’s unusual, but the important thing is to remember that when they happen, we have to take them seriously and we have to investigate how credible it is as soon as we can.”