Fernanda Gonzalez
Jose Medina/The Rider
On Oct. 20, an informative panel was held simultaneously on the Brownsville and Edinburg campuses when an alarming video showed disturbing images at the Zoom meeting immediately after the first speaker’s presentation.
The Political Science Association, in partnership with the Political Science department, hosted the event. The panel served as an informative event over former U.S. President Donald Trump’s indictment.
President of the Political Science Association Hannya Flores said after Lecturer Maylin Hernandez’s presentation, the Zoom meeting was disrupted.
Flores said the video started with what appeared to be a Doja Cat song playing with armed people shown on screen.
“It looked Middle-Eastern related because there was like an Arabic big description on the bottom of the video and I first thought it was a documentary,” she said. “It was just kind of confusing because then we had like professors were trying to exit it out. (3.40) All of a sudden I see videos of persons grabbing knives and there’s people kneeling on the screen.”
Associate Professor and Chair of the Political Science department Dongkyu Kim said event organizer and Lecturer Robert Velez tried to turn off the video. However, the buttons were disabled.
“But [it] is very apparent the screen is not a user Zoom, something was off,” Kim said. “I heard later that the buttons are deactivated, so it was really hard to turn it off.”
Assistant Chief of Police for Field Operations Esmeralda Guerra said the case is under investigation. University Police is conducting interviews to find out if attendees observed anything that might pertain to a criminal act.
“We are still under investigation because there [are] a lot of witnesses,” Guerra said. “We are trying to determine … what crime, if any, do we have?”
She said these types of investigations are time consuming.
“All we have is an IP address,” Guerra said. “They [are] not easily solved and they are time consuming because it requires us to send a lot of requests and assistance to try to determine who might be the owner of this IP address.”
She added the university has placed safety measures to try to avoid similar incidents in the future.
There is no time frame of when the investigation will conclude.
This is Fernanda Gonzalez for Vaquero Radio.
