At UNLV's Beam Hall, site of campus shooting, increased safety measures to greet staff, students

Frank and Estella Beam Hall at UNLV appears to look the same. Look closely, however, and you’ll notice the differences.

About eight months after an active shooter on Dec. 6, 2023, killed three professors and wounded another in Beam Hall, the building is reopening for UNLV’s fall semester with $2.5 million in enhanced safety measures.

Cameras have been added on some floors, a security guard in a bright yellow vest is now stationed on the first floor at a UNLV-branded desk, and phones with large screens hang off the walls of every classroom. Those phones are big enough to catch the attention of any student or teacher when it blinks during an emergency.

“The efforts that our team undertook are nothing short of Herculean, if you would. Our lives changed on Dec. 6,” said Musa Pam, associate vice president of facilities management at UNLV. “If you had stepped into this building on Dec. 5, and you came back today, what you’d be seeing is nothing different, other than some of the landscaping and painting enhancements … so what could have been a trigger for people to be able to see damage and what have you, those fears have been delayed.”

Pam said his 300-member team had been working tirelessly in the last several months to fix damages from the shooting and police activity, install new security measures and implement new procedures that would add an extra layer of security to the building.

On the first floor, students will notice immediately the security desk. The desk will be staffed with a private security officer in a yellow vest the entire time Beam Hall is open, and students can approach the officer should they have any safety concerns.

Individual security officers are going to be patrolling floors throughout the building and the exterior as well, allowing “people that are attending this building or in this building occupying it to have a direct pipeline to us in the form of radio communications,” Vasquez said.

This addition will cut down emergency response times and serve as “eyes and ears” for the command station, where many officers are already stationed.

Every classroom in Beam Hall has also been outfitted with new doors — which had been broken in by law enforcement during the lockdown as evacuations occurred — and upgraded phone systems that can show emergency alerts when activated.

Pam and Arnold Vasquez, interim director of University Police Services, explained that these “high-tech phones” can receive emergency notifications that flash on the device’s large screen to alert people of possible safety threats. Vasquez said the screens and the security alerts will be easily viewable by anyone in the classroom, even students that may be hard of hearing or deaf.

Some floors in Beam Hall now have extra security. Keycards are required for anyone with an office on floors three through five. At the end of spring commencement, Pam said UNLV officials identified everyone who frequented the upper levels of Beam Hall and gave them special keycards that must now be used in the elevators and stairwells.

The first two floors of Beam Hall are still open to everyone, regardless of whether they possess a card. Individual offices inside Beam Hall — including those of the Lee Business School and department of world language and cultures — are deciding on how to provide access in certain situations, like students needing to visit a professor during office hours or guests accessing a department office, Vasquez said.

Five cameras with a 360-degree view have been added to elevator lobbies; fire exit doors that were once unguarded must now be unlocked from the inside of the building; and many of the fire alarms on floors three through five that were activated manually during the Dec. 6 shooting have been replaced.

Many of the upgrades were made at the behest of law enforcement, university officials and faculty — who had “significant input” on what safety features they’d like to see. UNLV President Keith Whitfield said Beam Hall would be used as a test case to identify what security measures could be added to other buildings on campus.

“We want (people) to make sure that they kind of get back into the way we used to feel, which was very safe, and to see that the other measures that we take are trying to increase that safety,” Whitfield said, adding UNLV has “one of the best college police forces around.”

Security upgrades have taken place across campus as well, Pam said. Almost 500 doors were damaged by law enforcement during evacuations, so those were all repaired earlier this year in time for the spring semester.

Though university police officers are stationed in northern and southern zones on campus, other officers are roaming the campus, Vasquez said. Detectives are present so they may respond to emergencies “at a moment’s notice.”

Private security had also been hired by the university to increase the police presence around campus in case of an emergency.

Whitfield said he was “completely excited” to begin the academic year in two weeks and that the university was expecting an uptick in enrollment this fall semester, coming off a record of 29,360 undergraduate and graduate students attending during the 2024 spring semester, according to the Office of Decision Support.

Whitfield acknowledged that people may still have some apprehension in coming to campus but lauded the university’s efforts to increase mental health access through programs like their Resiliency and Justice Center as well as the Student Counseling and Psychological Services, known as CAPS.

Various committees across campus and within the Nevada System of Higher Education are weighing options for boosting security on all state university and college campuses, Whitfield added. He revealed that they’ll be approaching the next legislative session in 2025 with “a pretty significant ask” — some $38 million — to put enhanced security measures in as many buildings as they can, even at other off-campus sites like the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine on Shadow Lane.

Closing off campus completely doesn’t seem to be in the cards for Whitfield, who believes gates or fencing wouldn’t be as strong of a deterrent as some people think.

But as students and faculty head into the new semester, Vasquez emphasized that the campus was equipped to handle another emergency, and students should be prepared as well. In addition to using the university’s Rebel Safe emergency notification application, the campus community can call 911 in case of emergencies and should report any suspicious activity.

“I want (students) to come back and feel good about coming back to school. We have worked very, very hard, not only from a law enforcement standpoint, but with the institution as a whole,” Vasquez said. “But more importantly … we’re all responsible for each other’s safety, so if you see something, say something.”

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