Posted on February 16, 2015

UT-Arlington Student Admits Making up Claim That Gunman Followed Her to Campus, Threatened Her

Matt Peterson, Dallas Morning News, February 13, 2015

A UT-Arlington student who claimed she was threatened at gunpoint on campus this week admitted Friday that she’d lied, a university spokeswoman said.

The student told police she hadn’t even been at the school the day she said the incident occurred.

UT-Arlington had been investigating the complaint with Arlington, Denton and University of North Texas police, school spokeswoman Kristin Sullivan said.

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The university had issued an alert Friday that the student told police she had been followed six miles by a man in a pickup before she reached the campus. She had reported that when she parked at the university, the man threatened her and pointed a gun at her before he left.

The suspect was described as a white man in his mid-30s wearing a camouflage baseball cap, a short-sleeve blue shirt and bluejeans.

The student also posted on social media that the man might have targeted her because she is Muslim. In a Facebook post, she referred to the killings of three Muslim students this week in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Chapel Hill police say a long-running parking dispute between neighbors motivated 46-year-old Craig Stephen Hicks to kill Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23; his wife, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21; and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, at a condominium complex near the University of North Carolina campus.

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