Virginia police officers are searching for a heavily armed man who allegedly tried to assault a woman on Tidewater Community College’s Virginia Beach Campus on Wednesday, college officials said.

According to the reports, the college alerted the police after the incident, which happened at around 3 pm., in   Building G and involved a TCC instructor.

The victim was in a restroom when a man entered and pulled a gun on her, reports said. The suspect tried to assault the woman, but he fled when the woman screamed for help.

The woman is safe and did not sustain any injuries.

The College activated a 'shelter in place' at 4:14 pm that warned everyone in the college to “lock doors, go into designated internal area of assembly, turn out lights and stay away from windows.” But the alert was lifted at 4:32 pm.

The man is described as a 6-foot-tall black man wearing a white T-shirt and camouflage-style pants.

A spokesperson for the college said that administrators have no reason to believe the suspect is a student, but they will look through a database of student photos to see if the victim recognizes the attacker, the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson, Marian Anderfuren, said that the past five years she has been at the college and could not recall a single incident when they have issued a 'shelter in place' warning that was not for a tornado.

Though the emergency protocols are not often used in situations like today's, they are very much important, she said.

”What campuses are doing and what high colleges are doing and what grade colleges are doing, they have to have emergency protocols in place and know how to respond. That’s the world we live in today.”

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