The life-threatening Yak initially seemed innocuous, and maybe graduate assistant Ryan McKelvy would have ignored it completely if he had not noticed the word “assassination.”

The incident in question occurred at approximately 11 a.m. on Nov. 6 when a threatening message was discovered byMcKelvy and fellow graduate assistant Edgar Shockley. Mckelvy initially saw the threat while scrolling through Yik Yak, a twitter-like mobile app in which users are anonymous.

“On Yik Yak posts are based on location, specifically the university that you’re near,” said McKelvy. “I became aware of the threatening one when I was looking through various Yik Yak comments that morning. This was after a midterm, and many anonymous users were leaving not so nice things about Dr. Kindig. As I went down from comment to comment I eventually saw a violent one.”

The comment said, “Will pay for the assassination of Kindig.” After seeing this,McKelvy went two offices down and shared the comment with Shockley.

“After Ryan showed me the comment, I took a screenshot of it,” said Shockley. “Afterwards we passed it along to Doctor Kindig and Doctor Hewitt. There’s the chance that the threat wasn’t serious, but given the atmosphere on campus at the time I thought it would be a good idea to let them know about it.”

The campus police were also notified, but Kindig said he did not want it to dictate his schedule for the remainder of that day.

“The news didn’t bother me at all,” said Kindig. “Teachers are entrusted with authority, and any person with authority is eventually going to be criticized and possibly threatened. If it had been specific then I would have been a little more worried, but it wasn’t.

Kindig continued by offering a possible explanation for the incident and the social factors that created it.

“This threat is understandable, given the tension of our society,” said Kindig. “Young people today are far more driven to succeed at all costs than they ever were before and this inevitably creates stress. The comment was made right after a midterm, and when you get bad results on a test like that your chances of graduation may be at stake. I’ve been teaching for decades and I would hate to be a student in today’s world. At the same time though, social media has brought thousands of students together but sometimes it’s anonymously. In the old days, people would know you were joking or didn’t mean something because you were face to face or on the phone. With anonymous users we can’t really know at all, and no one has a way of gauging if a threat is serious or not.”

Dan Williams, chief of campus police, said the investigation has been classified as “suspended.”

“What that means is that this is an investigation that’s at a dead end,” said Williams. “At least until more information comes in and we can explore other leads.”

The reason for this investigation’s dead end is primarily due to the anonymity of Yik Yak and its privacy practices.

“For other sites like Facebook or Twitter, where their servers hold information about their users, we could have gotten subpoenas,” said Williams. “With Yik Yak being anonymous though we can’t trace it anywhere. We can’t get an IP address or even a name. That makes it difficult…well essentially impossible to accurately track.”

Williams went on to say for most of these social media scares the individual(s) have not gone through with the threat.

“We’re getting better at finding contact information on the big sites, but with so many of these smaller anonymous apps it’s not getting any easier,” said Williams. “Although I’ve been in law enforcement for 32 years, and in a lot of these cases it turns out to be a hoax. If something does happen, usually the individual just does it and doesn’t give any sort of warning. In the end though it’s always good to be cautious.”

The entire campus community may never have known about the threat if not for comments made by Harry Hewitt, chair of the history department, while asking Robert Nelson a question during the third presidencial forum.

“The topic of guns had come up at the other two presidential forums and I was trying to figure out something about the subject that I could ask,” said Hewitt. “I thought that this was the time to talk about how one of my faculty had been targeted through social media.

Though the threat to Kindig’s life and the Facebook shooting message last year did not end with their objectives being carried out, the university can still end up suffering. When the campus is evacuated the faculty are paid for a day they are not educating students, and as seen last December, students lose valuable class time.

“The crazy thing is that these threats didn’t happen in my middle school or even high school,” said Jason Frawley, managing information systems sophomore. “Every time it happens my mom calls me about it and I end up staying home. Most of the time these threats do seem to happen during exams, but in the back of my mind I still want to be safe.”

Daris Polonio, sociology senior, said he’s tired of seeing the use of social media for threatening disasters and is just ready to graduate.

Any safety concern should be taken seriously, whether its campus wide or directed at one person, but these people causing panic is not the right way to go about their problem,” said Polonio. “I feel it’s a waste of my time if I stay up all night preparing for an exam and then the school or one of my professors is forced to reschedule, sometimes on the weekends. That can affect my work schedule and move-out date. If I had a chance to respond to the hoaxers, I would say that their actions have a ripple effect and can cause problems outside the lives of their intended target.”