University of Mississippi administrators are investigating after a Ring doorbell clip captured two white students making monkey noises and gestures outside the door of a Black freshman on the night of November 6.
The 13-second footage, stamped at 8:37 p.m., shows three young women walking past an off-campus apartment shared by three Black students. Two of them step toward the camera. One beats her chest while making the sounds. The second moves closer and does the same. A third walks past without joining. Freshman Jakiyra Metcalf posted the video to TikTok the next day with the overlay “ole miss??” and the caption “What do we have to say about this??” The clip quickly passed 11 million views.
Metcalf said in comments that the women live upstairs and that she and her roommates had not had any earlier run-in with them. Tasha Bolton, who identified herself as the mother of one of the roommates, shared the video on Facebook and pressed the university for a clear response on what it planned to do.
Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Shawnboda Mead released a statement Sunday evening. “The behavior depicted in this video is deeply troubling, hurtful, and unacceptable,” she wrote. “We condemn the behavior as it does not reflect our university’s values or the kind of community we strive to be every day.” Mead said the Office of Conflict Resolution and Student Conduct and the Office of Equal Opportunity and Regulatory Compliance are reviewing the incident. Staff have already contacted the students who live in the apartment and offered support.
She also noted that at least one person circulating online as involved had been misidentified, and that no members of any Ole Miss sorority took part. The local Alpha Phi chapter issued its own statement asking people to stop sharing unverified names and photos. Any disciplinary outcome will stay private under federal student privacy rules.
The Black Student Union condemned the gestures and the long history attached to them. The group said directing that kind of behavior at a student where she lives left people feeling unwelcome and unsafe, and it called for a full review under university policy.
The episode arrives two years after a separate incident on the same campus. In May 2024, during pro-Palestine protests, a white male student was filmed making similar monkey noises and gestures toward Black graduate student Jaylin Smith. That student was later removed from Phi Delta Theta.
As of Monday the current investigation remains open. The university has not named the students in the video.
Call of Duty FaceTime Chat Mistaken for Bomb Talk Leads to Plane and Terminal Evacuation in California
A Frontier Airlines flight and the east wing of Terminal 2 at Ontario International Airport were evacuated Sunday night after a passenger reported hearing someone say “bomb” and “explosion” while the plane sat waiting to depart.
Ontario police said the report came in sometime before 10 p.m. Officers detained a man on the flight. He told them he had been on a FaceTime call with a friend who was playing Call of Duty. According to police spokesperson Denyse Quezada, the friend had just been eliminated by an in-game C4 explosion, and the words the passenger heard referred to the game rather than any real device.
Crews searched the aircraft and the surrounding area and found nothing. Police determined no crime had been committed. All passengers, including the man who had been detained, reboarded, and the flight later left. Airport officials said they cleared the terminal area out of an abundance of caution while the check was underway.
The episode is one of several recent cases in which ordinary video-game talk has set off airport security protocols that treat any mention of a bomb as an immediate threat.
