University of Ottawa Lifts Lockdown After Suspicious Man Arrested Near Campus

A suspicious man who prompted a nearly two-hour lockdown at the University of Ottawa was arrested just before 7 p.m. Friday on Waller Street, a road running along the campus's eastern edge, but police have yet to say whether he was armed, what he was doing, or what charge, if any, he will face.

Ottawa Police Service received the first calls of a suspicious person at 4:20 p.m. ET, deploying increased presence along Nicholas Street and Laurier Avenue near the university. Nearly an hour passed before the university issued a formal lockdown notice at 5:18 p.m., describing the situation as a "violent incident on campus" and directing students, staff, and faculty to shelter in place immediately. Under the university's posted safety protocols, that instruction carried stark language: people were told to remain inside, stay away from doors and windows, remain silent, and if their lives were in imminent danger, to "run, hide, or defend yourself by any means necessary until you can get away."

The university issued subsequent lockdown holds at 6:00 p.m. and 6:37 p.m. as the police investigation continued across surrounding blocks. The arrest on Waller Street came just before 7 p.m., and the university lifted the lockdown at 7:10 p.m., announcing on social media that the campus was safe. The Ottawa Paramedic Service confirmed it received no calls related to a university incident, and Ottawa Police stated there were "no injuries to report and no ongoing threat to public safety." The man remains unidentified and no charges have been announced.

For students inside the perimeter, the gap between what was happening and what they were being told was stark. Mehmet Ozbay was outside his dorm building when campus security approached him and told him to go inside. "It's a scary thing that things like this can happen," he said. Third-year student Jasmine Martin didn't learn about the lockdown through any university alert at all. "I did not know there was a lockdown until my mom gave me a call and was freaking out and asked if I was OK," Martin said. Her account raises a pointed question about whether the university's alert system reached students reliably in the nearly 58 minutes between the first police call and the official lockdown notice.

The disruption extended beyond the campus itself. OC Transpo suspended stops at uOttawa station on O-Train Line 1 during the lockdown, bypassing a station that opened in September 2019 and serves as a key transit link near the Rideau Canal. Service was restored after the all-clear.

The University of Ottawa enrolls approximately 44,000 full-time undergraduate students and sits in the heart of downtown Ottawa, close to Parliament Hill. Its open urban campus, bordered by the Sandy Hill neighbourhood to the east and major transit corridors to the west, means any security incident spills quickly into the surrounding city. What Ottawa Police have not yet explained is what made this man suspicious enough to warrant a lockdown of that scale, and whether the threat assessment driving nearly two hours of shelter-in-place orders was proportionate to what was ultimately found. That unanswered question may determine how the university recalibrates its communication protocols going forward.