Fight leads to gunfire on Texas college campus

JUAN A. LOZANO

MICHAEL GRACZYK

Asso­ci­ated Press

HOUSTON — A fight between two peo­ple erupted in gun­fire Tues­day at a Houston-area com­mu­nity col­lege, catch­ing a main­te­nance man in the cross­fire and leav­ing stu­dents and oth­ers cow­er­ing in classrooms.

No one was killed, but the vol­ley of gun­shots heard shortly after 12 p.m. on the Lone Star Col­lege cam­pus sparked fear of another cam­pus mas­sacre just more than a month after 26 peo­ple were killed at an ele­men­tary school in New­town, Conn.

The shoot­ing hap­pened out­side between an aca­d­e­mic build­ing and the library where Luis Resendiz, 22, was study­ing on the sec­ond floor. An employee called police and then herded the 30 to 40 peo­ple in the library into a small room and told them to crouch down, he said.

Keisha Cohn, 27, was in a build­ing about 50 feet away and began run­ning as soon as she heard the shots.

“To stay where I was wasn’t an option,” said Cohn, who fled to a build­ing that houses com­put­ers and study areas. All the stu­dents even­tu­ally were evac­u­ated, run­ning out of build­ings as police offi­cers led them to safety.

Author­i­ties offered no details about what led to the fight. One of the peo­ple involved had a stu­dent ID, and both peo­ple were wounded and hos­pi­tal­ized, Har­ris County Sheriff’s Maj. Armando Tello said. A fourth per­son also was taken to a hos­pi­tal for a med­ical con­di­tion, he said.

Mark Zaragosa said he had just come out of an EMT class when he saw two peo­ple who were injured and stopped to help them.

“The two peo­ple that I took care of had just minor injuries,” he told KHOU-TV. “One gen­tle­man had a gun­shot to the knee and the (other) actu­ally had an entry wound to the lower but­tocks area.”

The shoot­ing last month at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School height­ened secu­rity con­cerns at cam­puses across the coun­try. Resendiz said the Con­necti­cut shoot­ing was the first thing he thought of when he heard gun­fire and he won­dered if a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion was hap­pen­ing on his campus.

“I didn’t think some­thing like this could hap­pen. You don’t think about it hap­pen­ing to you,” he said.

Sev­eral school dis­tricts in Texas have either imple­mented or are con­sid­er­ing a plan to allow fac­ulty to carry guns on cam­pus. While guns are not allowed on col­lege cam­puses, the Texas Leg­is­la­ture this year may debate a bill that would allow them.

Richard Car­pen­ter, chan­cel­lor of the Lone Star Col­lege Sys­tem, said the cam­pus is a gun-free zone that “has been safe for 40 years.”

“We think it’s still safe,” he added. He also described the main­te­nance man, who was said to be in his 50s and listed in sta­ble con­di­tion, as “in good shape.”

Police evac­u­ated and closed the cam­pus after the shoot­ing. It reopened in the late after­noon, with classes expected to resume Wednesday.

The noise that rang through the second-floor tutor­ing lab where Daniel Flo­res was study­ing ini­tially sounded to him “like some­one was kick­ing a door.”

“I didn’t think they were shots,” said Flo­res, 19.

About 60 peo­ple were in the lab, and they began run­ning out of the room once they real­ized the sound was gun­fire, he said. They fled to a nearby stu­dent ser­vices cen­ter, where author­i­ties kept them there for about 30 min­utes before let­ting them go.

Cody Har­ris, 20, said he was in a class­room with about six or seven other stu­dents wait­ing for a psy­chol­ogy class to start when he heard eight shots. He and other stu­dents looked at each other, said “I guess we should get out of here,” and fled.

“I was just wor­ried about get­ting out,” Har­ris said. “I called my grand­mother and asked her to pick me up.”

Posted by AP News on Jan 22 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.