A gunman opened fire Monday night at Michigan State University, killing three people and wounding five more, before fatally shooting himself miles away amid an hours long manhunt that forced frightened students to hide in the dark.
Police announced the man’s death early Tuesday, four hours after shootings broke out, first at Berkey Hall, an academic building, and then nearby at the MSU Union, a popular hub to eat or study.
“This truly has been a nightmare we’re living tonight,” said Chris Rozman, interim deputy chief of the campus police department.
Hundreds of officers had scoured the East Lansing campus, about 90 miles (145 kilometres) northwest of Detroit, for the suspect, whom police described as a short Black man with red shoes, a jean jacket and ball cap.
He was found dead off campus from a “self-inflicted gunshot wound,” Rozman said.
Rozman said it was too early to know a motive and whether the man had some type of affiliation with the university. His name was not immediately released.
“There’s a lot that we don’t know at this point,” Rozman said.
Two people were killed at Berkey and another was killed at the MSU Union, he said.
Sparrow Hospital spokesperson John Foren said he had no information on the conditions of five injured people taken there, though Rozman said some had life-threatening wounds.
Before the gunman was found dead, WDIV-TV meteorologist Kim Adams, whose daughter attends Michigan State, told viewers that students were worn down by the hours long saga.
“They’ve been hiding, all the lights off in a dark room,” Adams said. “Their cell phones are starting to lose battery charge. They don’t all have chargers with them and losing contact with the outside world is terrifying on a normal day for college kids, let alone when there’s someone out there that they haven’t caught yet.”
Aedan Kelley, a junior who lives a half-mile (less than a kilometre) east of campus, said he locked his doors and covered his windows “just in case.” Sirens were constant, he said, and a helicopter hovered overhead.
“It’s all very frightening,” Kelley said. “And then I have all these people texting me wondering if I’m OK, which is overwhelming.”
Michigan State has about 50,000 students. All campus activities were cancelled for 48 hours, including sports and classes.
The shooting at Michigan State is the latest in what has become a deadly new year in the U.S. Dozens of people have died in mass shootings so far in 2023, most notably in California where 11 people were killed as they welcomed the Lunar New Year at a dance hall popular with older Asian Americans.
In 2022, there were more than 600 mass shootings in the US in which at least four people were killed or injured, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
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