JACKSON — University of Mississippi graduate Matthew Sleep says he was attending an engineering class in another building at Virginia Tech on Monday when he and other students saw police arriving on campus.

Sleep, a 2004 graduate of Ole Miss, is a doctoral candidate in engineering at Virginia Tech.

“I was in class in Patton Hall, another engineering building next to Norris Hall,” Sleep, of Nashville, told the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal newspaper in Tupelo.

“At about 9:40 we saw a police cruiser drive up the lawn and go straight up the hill, then we looked outside and saw more police with their guns drawn.”

Sleep said he and fellow students thought it was another in a series of bomb threats that had been reported in previous weeks, but then authorities ordered them to go to the third floor.

“We went to my office, which is in that building,” he said.

From there, he and others saw emergency responders carrying an apparent shooting victim. The students were allowed to leave the building about 1:30 p.m., at which time Sleep and some others went to a hospital to try to find another friend.

School officials said about two hours after two people were killed at a dormitory Monday, 30 more people were killed at a campus building by a gunman who finally killed himself with a shot to his head.

Sleep said the irony of having such a massive tragedy at Blacksburg was mind-boggling.

“I went to school in Oxford, and I came here because it was so much like Oxford,” he said. “It’s a small town that just has one main street. It’s just the university and the town, and nothing ever happens here.

“It’s insane that anything like that could happen here.”

Hattiesburg native Kim Williams, also a graduate student, was teaching a physics lab at Virginia Tech when an e-mail came through the school’s system about a shooting.

“They thought they had it under control, (and the e-mail said) to go on about our day and be very careful,” Williams told the Hattiesburg American. “Just a few minutes later, we got an e-mail about a second shooting, telling us to stay inside. It was time for classes to change over, so I told everyone to stay there. After that, we were pretty much sitting in that room for hours.”

Williams, 24, said she couldn’t hear the sound of gunfire.

“But we heard all the ambulances and saw the police cars flying by, and we could see anytime anyone passed by outside.

“We could see all the officers between us and the buildings where it was happening, but at the same time I was also teaching engineering students who were worried about their friends,” she said.

Mississippians with ties to Virginia Tech were trying to cope with the shooting rampage.

“It’s sort of a horrifying incident,” said Kirk Schulz, dean of Mississippi State’s School of Engineering and a Virginia Tech graduate who runs an alumni chapter with his wife.

As much as schools try to prepare for situations like it, he said, “that could happen, unfortunately at any university.”

Jackson engineer Bill McDonald was worried about his 22-year-old niece, Sarah Ann Jennings, a Meridian native studying fashion design on the Blacksburg campus.

After McDonald’s wife began making calls, he got Sarah on the phone around 1:30 p.m. and found out his niece, who works near campus, didn’t go to school Monday after classes were canceled.

“She was OK, but sounded a little shook up,” he said. “One or two of her friends were injured. A sorority sister was shot, and she’s in stable condition.”

MSU President Robert “Doc” Foglesong on Monday offered a series of tips to the MSU community reminding students to be “always vigilant and exercise appropriate caution.”

People should put the number to the MSU police department into their cell phones, call 911 in an emergency and never hesitate to call MSU police about suspicious behavior, Foglesong said.

MSU has enhanced its security with a command center on the Starkville campus and conducts mock disaster drills, but it’s not enough to prevent a tragedy like what happened Monday, said Bill Kibler, MSU vice president for student affairs.

“We can’t ever provide a 100 percent guarantee that this will never happen on campus,” Kibler said.

Jackson State University has good security, and the school “remains vigilant in regular police and security patrols” and works closely with area law enforcement to keep students safe, said JSU spokesman Anthony Dean.

The University of Southern Mississippi police have gone through training, including hostage situations, and is prepared to deal with an active shooter situation like the one at Virginia Tech, said campus chief Bob Hopkins.

Hinds Community College has 18 full-time officers and nine-part-time officers who constantly move around school. Still, the college experienced an accidental shooting on campus last fall.

“No campus in this country is immune,” HCC-Raymond campus chief Michelle Lee told The Clarion-Ledger newspaper. “If you’ve got an open campus, anything can happen.”

A shooting like that at Virginia Tech “probably impacts the world and makes us realize how insecure, from a physical standpoint, we all are,” said Chester Quarles, a professor of criminal justice at Ole Miss and an author of public school safety books.