USC religious cookouts sent running by active shooter scare. ‘A lot of anxiety’
The St. Thomas More Catholic Student Mission at the University of South Carolina had tables set up for their 6 p.m. Welcome Back Cookout Sunday night. They sat abandoned less than an hour after it started.
The Mission is on Greene Street with a chapel around the corner, about a block away from Thomas Cooper Library. At 6:34 p.m., campus police sent out a Carolina Alert to students that an active shooter was suspected to be at the library.
While the university would later report around 7:15 p.m. that there was “no evidence” of an active shooter and issue an “all clear” at 8:05 p.m., later confirming the threats as a hoax, the scare caused a panic around campus. A multitude of police and public safety workers responded. Students ran and hid, some barricading themselves in place. Two students incurred minor injuries during the evacuation of the library, the university reported.
Mariclaire Murdaugh, a senior at USC, was at the cookout with a group of students when they heard sirens followed by a throng of police racing down Pickens Street. They thought the sight was weird, she said, and it was then that they got the alert.
Nearly everyone at the cookout “frantically” went inside the St. Thomas More building, where they stayed until police sent the “all clear,” Murdaugh recalled.
She said the students inside were “confused and worried” but didn’t feel concerned for their safety, with the building being locked by a code system, the blinds closed and several police cars right outside.
“We felt like we were safe here but I think there was a lot of anxiety,” Murdaugh said. “This is our school and there’s unity in that as a student body, and we didn’t know what was happening to our peers.”
Around the corner on Pickens Street, the Methodist Student Network was hosting its weekly dinner. Every Sunday evening around 6 p.m., they invite students for worship and a free cookout.
Reporters on the scene found abandoned food on grills and a disrupted game of cornhole near the Methodist church just after 7:30 p.m.
The ministry was empty on Monday morning, and requests for comment were not immediately answered.
Murdaugh and Lillie Hecker, a sophomore at USC, said that during the Sunday scare there were a lot of people in their group not hearing back from friends they knew were in the library.
“There was just a lot of [thoughts such as] ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Why is this happening on a Sunday night at our school?’” Murdaugh said.
Mass at the chapel had just finished when the alert was sent, but some stayed after to pray by themselves. It’s tradition for students to leave their phones behind or keep them on silent. Some were “without information for an hour and a half,” another student at the mission said.
And some students who had already left returned in the midst of the lockdown, students said.
“Some people, instead of going to the [Catholic student] center, wanted to go in the chapel and pray for everyone and make sure everything’s going OK,” Hecker said. “I think for most of the people who were in the chapel, it was a choice.”
Many who were in the chapel eventually moved back to the center, even though the campus was on lockdown, Hecker said.
Several students were studying outside the St. Thomas More building on Monday morning, with the threat now over.
This story was originally published August 25, 2025 at 3:15 PM.
