Los Angeles: Two people were killed Wednesday morning in a murder-suicide at the University of California-Los Angeles, according to police, and the campus was reopened after a lockdown lasting about two hours.
“The campus is now safe,” Charlie Beck, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, said at a news conference. “The issue that occurred has been contained.”
Beck said police could not immediately confirm the identities of the two people killed, their relationship or their roles at the school, saying only that they were both men. “Many, many questions are unanswered at this point,” Beck said.
The university said the campus reopened a short time after 12pm, but classes were canceled for the remainder of the day.
The two men were found in a small office in the engineering building, Beck said. He also said it was possible there was a suicide note at the scene, but said this could not be confirmed.
Police were called to the campus regarding calls about at least three gunshots fired at about 10am on Wednesday, Beck said.
The campus was locked down on Wednesday as dozens of law enforcement officials responded, as police said they remained concerned about a potential active shooter situation.
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said: “Our hearts are heavy this evening as our campus family mourns the sudden and tragic deaths of two people on our campus earlier today. The thoughts and prayers of our entire UCLA family are with the victims' families and the students, faculty and staff of UCLA Engineering.”
Search
After a prolonged search involving local and federal law enforcement officers on the campus and surrounding areas, ultimately police determined that there were no remaining suspects.
However, Beck said police would continue to search the building where the shooting occurred even after students were released from lockdown.
An attorney in Orange County, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the situation, was worried when he heard reports of a shooter in the engineering building where his father, a professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA, has an office.
Murder-suicide kills two at UCLA, shuts down campus https://t.co/J1hpJdjyNB pic.twitter.com/F6Sz8hti2C— Lew Hastings (@LewHastings) June 2, 2016
In a text exchange, his father described having to hold a door closed while shots were fired.
“My dad is now out safe, thankfully,” he said in a telephone interview. “They locked down in their offices ‘til SWAT teams broke down the doors and escorted everyone out of the building.”
The law enforcement response on Wednesday was typical of what is seen after shootings and reports of gunshots at schools. Initial information is often fluid and uncertain, as police work to figure out if they are responding to another mass shooting — like the rampage at Roseburg, Oregon, last fall — or a murder-suicide, as occurred at a Phoenix high school this year.
Shelter in place
Schools often respond quickly to potential violence, running shelter-in-place drills during the year and locking down facilities when there are reports of gunfire. They also have increasingly become targets for threats of bombs and violence, as callers across the country this year have disrupted classes and stoked fear in dozens of schools.
Due to the lockdown at the university, police across Los Angeles were placed on tactical alert, according to the LAPD.
The incident began a few minutes after 10am local time, according to Tony Im, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD and FBI both responded to the scene, along with agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The President was briefed aboard Air Force One on the shooting, according to the White House.
The public university has 43,000 students on its Los Angeles campus. The main commencement ceremony is June 10.
Repeat performance
A UCLA student who spent hours sheltering in a building after a campus shooting that killed two people did the same thing two years ago during another deadly attack farther north.
Twenty-one-year-old Jeremy Peschard says Wednesday's lockdown felt "eerily similar" to May 23, 2014, when he was locked down in a dorm at UC Santa Barbara.
That's when a mentally ill man, Elliot Rodger, killed six university students and wounded 13 other people near the Isla Vista campus before killing himself.
Peschard says it was scary in both cases to be shut off from the world, but he was a bit less shocked this time.
Peschard says it's sad, but in this day and age, college shootings seem to have become so common that people are treating them as a "normalized threat, almost like a natural disaster."
Open doors
A UCLA official says he's troubled by reports of doors that couldn't be locked when students were trying to take shelter after a shooting on campus.
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Scott Waugh said Wednesday that the school will review the situation with the doors and all of its procedures to make sure the campus is as secure as possible.
Waugh said he was pleased with the campus alert system that quickly texted and emailed people about the danger.
Police say the morning shooting was a murder-suicide that occurred in an office in an engineering building where the bodies of two men were found.
Waugh would say only that the men were members of the campus community. He did not release any further information about them.
Waugh said the engineering school, where the shooting took place, will not have classes until Monday, when finals week begins. Classes on the rest of campus resume Thursday.
