EAST LANSING, Mich. (WLNS) — The FBI has extended its support, saying they’re here for whatever the Spartan community and MSU police need.
“The FBI is here to support our partners at Michigan state university, whatever the chief and his folks need we are here to do. We bring people, we bring capabilities and we are here from the time it began,” said FBI Special Agent Jim Tarasca. “The investigation will continue.”
The only part of the investigation that’s ongoing are the events following when police made contact with the suspect.
“We had police in the area, they responded, they did encounter the suspect at that particular point. The sequence of events after that, that’s still part of the overall investigation,” said Marlon Lynch, the Vice President for Public Safety and Chief of Police at MSU.
Police said staff jumped into action almost immediately both on and off the scene.
“It was some of our MSU investigators that utilize the video management system on a daily basis,” continued Lynch. “Went in and starting reviewing footage, literally going through frame by frame making use of the times of sequence of events and saw it.”
Lynch said the video management system was part of an upgrade made to campus security.
“We did install and upgrade security systems to include cameras on campus, as you saw, the picture that was released, was taken from video footage that was in the union, that is part of our system,” continued Lynch.
Without it, FBI agent Tarasca said this could have been an ongoing search.
“If we hadn’t had that image, this could continue being a ‘Who done it?’, a manhunt which is always a horrible situation. It would keep the campus locked down for weeks until that individual was found so the camera systems absolutely paid off,” said Tarasca.
