HYDE PARK — The University of Chicago will reopen campus on Tuesday after being closed Monday due to online threats of violence.
On Monday afternoon, FBI arrested Jabari Dean, a 21-year-old electrical engineering student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, for posting and then quickly deleting a comment online that threatened to kill 16 people on the University of Chicago campus and white police officers.
The university, U. of C. Laboratory School, charter schools and other institutions on campus will resume normal hours on Tuesday morning.
“The university will leave additional security presence in place through the end of the autumn quarter,” said university President Robert Zimmer in a letter to faculty and staff on Monday evening.
Dean was charged Monday with transmitting a threat in interstate commerce, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He will be back in court on Tuesday and prosecutors are not expected to object to bond.
Dean posted threats from his mother’s phone on the website Worldstarhiphop.com on Saturday and then later deleted it, but not before a tipster sent the comments to federal agents in New York, according to the FBI.
According to Dean’s family, FBI agents questioned Dean on Sunday evening at his home on the 600 block of East 79th Street where he lives with his mother and then returned on Monday at 10:30 a.m. to arrest him.
It is unclear whether the university closed its campus before or after agents questioned Dean about the post.
A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment.
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