A bomb threat closed the Capitol for more than three hours on April 20, at the same time the governor and other state executives remembered the shooting victims at Virginia Tech.
Employees were evacuated from the House and Senate buildings, as well as the Executive Tower, the older Capitol additions and the Capitol Museum. A Capitol Museum employee said she was told to leave shortly before 8 am.
Capitol Police Sgt. Robert Gerome said a bomb threat was called in about 7:20 a.m. The caller just said there was a bomb at the Capitol building.
“It was brief and they hung up,” Gerome said.
Phoenix police, the Department of Public Safety and Capitol police swept the building using bomb-sniffing dogs before deciding it was safe for people to return, Gerome said.
Because of the evacuation, the memorial ceremony was moved from the Senate lawn to Wesley Bolin Plaza, on the east side of 17th Avenue.
At 9 a.m., Gov. Janet Napolitano rang a large bell five times slowly in memory of the 32 students shot to death in a dormitory and classrooms on the Virginia Tech campus on April 16. Afterward, she stood in silence along with other elected state officials, as well as Arizona Chief Justice Ruth McGregor.
The governor appeared emotionally moved during the moment of silence. Several hundred people attended the ceremony, held as part of a nationwide day of mourning.
When the ceremony ended, state employees and others with state business could not get into the Capitol. House employees were told to go home and check in at noon.
State Treasurer Dean Martin, who attended the morning ceremony, ended up joining his staff in the parking lot of Associated General Contractors – just west of the Capitol. He said a few staff members – traders and information technology workers — went home, where they could access their office computers remotely.
Other staffers, however, had to wait for the go-ahead to re-enter the building to get computer access, he said.
“The irony is we have in the budget a measure that would to give all our staff remote access,” Martin said.
In addition, he said, some state agencies make daily deposits of receipts at the Treasurer’s Office. With the evacuation, he added, those deposits would be delayed.
“Effectively this just piles up work for us that we’re going to have to deal with when we get back in,” Martin said.
A Senate staffer said they were allowed back in about 11:15 a.m.