Hours after five people, including four students, were shot and injured on the campus of Morgan State University, Baltimore authorities said early Wednesday that a suspect had not been found or arrested.
The shooting, which occurred during the annual homecoming events Tuesday night, prompted an hour-long stay-at-home order and the cancellation of classes Wednesday.
A woman and four men, ages 18 to 22, are being treated for non-life-threatening gunshot wounds, the city’s Police Commissioner Richard Worley said at a news conference early Wednesday. The president of the university, David Kwabena Wilson, said classes had been cancelled.
The shooting happened a year later The ceremony to crown Mr. and Miss Morgan State precedes Saturday’s football game. At historically black colleges and universities, homecoming is an important tradition that unites generations of students and alumni.
Police officers on patrol heard gunshots around 9:25 p.m., as students made their way from a packed auditorium in the Murphy Fine Arts Center to a coronation ceremony in the university’s student center. The university asked people to stay clear of the area around the Arts Center and Thurgood Marshall Hall, a nearby dormitory building, where police warned the shooter was active.
Minutes later, officers found the victims and noticed windows had been broken, leading them to believe it was an active shooter, Mr. Worley said. The Baltimore Police Department quickly issued a shelter-in-place order, which was lifted early Wednesday morning.
Police have not located or arrested a suspect, Mr. Worley said. But he said the decision to lift the shelter-in-place order came after it was determined there was no longer an active shooter situation.
“We didn’t open the complex until our SWAT team cleared the building the suspect ran into, or where we thought the gunfire came from,” he said, adding that police believe the shooting happened outside.
Tuesday night marked at least the third year in a row that a shooting disrupted homecoming week at Morgan State. A man was shot Last October Coming home after the party “not allowed”. Two years agoA student was shot at the end of an otherwise quiet homecoming week.
Federal agencies, incl Federal Bureau of Investigation And this Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and ExplosivesThey said they were responding to gunfire. Governor Wes Moore Maryland’s office said it was aware of the situation.
“These horrific events are all about one thing over and over again: easy access to guns.” Bill Ferguson, a Democratic state legislator representing Baltimore, said on social media. “I cannot fathom the feelings of parents who fear for the safety of their children in Morgan tonight.”
Morgan State University is one of Maryland’s oldest historically black colleges, with an enrollment of approximately 9,000 students.
Tuesday night’s situation at Morgan State is the latest example of an armed man threatening a college campus. In August, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was charged with killing a faculty member.
Later that month, a white gunman entered the Jacksonville, Fla., campus of Edward Waters University, a historically black college, where he donned a bulletproof vest and minutes later killed three black people at a nearby Dollar General store. .
In February, a gunman killed three students and wounded five others on the campus of Michigan State University.
