 "Photo:")
A part-time Boston University student was banned from campus yesterday after pleading not guilty to charges of threatening to commit a crime when he allegedly said he would recreate the Virginia Tech shootings to a woman he had dated at a nearby college.
Andrew Rosenblum, 20, is under house arrest and is being monitored by a 24-hour GPS monitoring device after posting a $50,000 cash bail. He is allowed to leave his home with an escort when visiting his doctor or attorney.
Rosenblum had sent online messages hours after Monday's deadly shootings to a woman at Wheelock College, threatening to kill her friends and himself, according to police.
Rosenblum pleaded not guilty to three counts of threatening to commit a crime at the Roxbury Division of the Boston Municipal Court Department yesterday. He will return to court for a pre-trial conference June 13, according to a press release from the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office.
"Andrew is very remorseful for his language and sincerely regrets the pain he has caused so many people," said his attorney, Jay Carney. "He has regretted the language he used since almost immediately after completing the IM session.
Rosenblum, who was enrolled in two courses at Metropolitan College, was barred from the campus after BU Police Department officer Ronald Ford requested it at the arraignment, according to an April 19 Boston Herald article.
BUPD representatives could not be reached for comment.
The BU administration takes such threats "extremely seriously," said Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore in an online statement yesterday.
"We followed a fairly standard procedure, which I think is pretty aggressive," Elmore told The Daily Free Press. "It does happen, and it's happened before, and the difference is the media coverage is there because of the unfortunate incident at Virginia Tech."
BU officials have no plans to monitor community members' emails, Elmore said.
"If a student or faculty member or staff member believes someone has said something or threatened them and put them in fear, they really should let someone know about it," he said.
BU has also been in contact with Wheelock about Rosenblum and the impact the incident has had on both campuses, Elmore said.
At the arraignment, the judge honored Wheelock representatives' requests that Rosenblum be forbidden from coming to campus and also contacting the students he allegedly threatened at Wheelock, whose student body is 94 percent female.
"We are very much in the same line as BU is," said Wheelock Public Relations Director Rochelle Rosen.
Rosenblum, who hosts an online video-game review show, sent the first threatening messages to a Wheelock student whom he dated in 2005 late Monday night, according to a police report. These messages continued into the early hours of Tuesday morning and stated Rosenblum would kill her, a friend and others she loved, and then he would shoot himself, the report states.
"It's gonna be VT all over again," the message read, a reference to the shootings at Virginia Tech earlier that day, according to the report. "The best is in the end when I pull the trigger on myself, too."
Carney said because the Virginia Tech shootings may have influenced how the police approached Rosenblum, but he said police acted appropriately.
Carney said when Rosenblum sent the online messages, he was despondent over the recent death of his grandmother and the breakup of a relationship with a woman.
"Who among us has not said something in a moment of anger and pain to a loved one that we haven't later regretted?" Carney said.
The woman printed the online messages before contacting the Boston Police Department, police said. BPD referred the report to the Needham Police Department, whose officers picked up Rosenblum at his parents' home early Tuesday morning. They then turned custody and care of Rosenblum to the Newton-Wellesley Hospital psychiatric ward.
"Specifically, because threats of violence were allegedly made not to just two victims but against a large numbers of individuals at their school . . . it did require more stringent conditions of bail," said Jake Wark, press secretary for the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office.
A woman who answered the phone at the Rosenblum residence declined to comment on the incident last night.
Virginia Tech senior Cho Seung-Hui shot and killed 32 community members on the Blacksburg, Va. campus before killing himself Monday, the deadliest shooting in the country's history.
A 12,000-student school district in California was locked down yesterday as police searched for a man who allegedly threatened to also recreate the Virginia Tech shootings in the area.
Staff reporters Christina Crapanzano, Sam Kuttner, Marcos Lopez and Barbara Rodriguez contributed reporting for this article.
Be the first to comment on this article!