The standard serenity of UC Irvine was shattered Sunday evening when a graduate student shot and killed his ex-wife at an on-campus housing complex.

The campus of UC Irvine, as well as Irvine itself, is known for its tranquility and safety.

But Sunday’s shooting re-affirms the unpredictability of such crimes and further emphasizes the importance of signing up for our own emergency messaging system, AlertU.

AlertU is specifically designed to inform the student body, staff and faculty of such and any emergency in an instantanious manner through an SMS-based emergency notification service to your mobile phone.

A school shooting, for example, would activate the system wtih real-time information on the safety of the campus and further instructions by text mail.

Cerritos College campus police Chief Richard Bukowiecki encourages every student to activate the AlertU system onto their mobile phones.

“Our goal is to have every student activate it. It doesn’t do any good if people don’t sign up for it.  And these are the kind of situations that this system is designed for.”

Signing up for AlertU is simple.

You can sign up through your mobile phone by texting ‘cerritos’ to 253788 or sign up online at certitos.edu/police/alertu and entering your phone number.

Chief Bukowiecki further adds, “The tragedy that happend at UC Irvine is very rare. We hear about it and people get realy upset, and they should because of where it occurred. But the fact of the matter is campuses generally are very, very safe. They continue to be very safe. Our hope is that we never have to use this system for those kind of messages, but you have to have something in place. You have to have some kind of way to let the students know immediately if there is a danger on campus. This is the way to do that. So it’s important to get all the students to sign up.”