ETTRICK, Va. (AP) — Authorities were seeking additional people who fired weapons during a shooting at Virginia State University that left five people wounded, police said Sunday, as a 19-year-old suspect remained in custody and investigators sought to unravel what happened.
Investigators were trying to determine what led to Saturday's shooting and if the others who fired did so in self-defense or if they were among the aggressors, said Lt. James Lamb,
commander of the Chesterfield County Police Department's Major Crimes Unit. He did not say how many others fired weapons.
“We don’t have specific locations that we are looking (at) yet as we are working on identifying them,” Lamb said in an email response to questions from The Associated Press.
The shooting, just after 1:30 a.m. Saturday, prompted a campus lockdown and came as students were getting ready for the new school year. It happened near the university’s Quad Annexes, where campus police and Chesterfield County officers found five people with gunshot wounds outside campus dormitories.
Many students had just completed the university’s “New Trojans Experience” for incoming students. Classes resume Monday.
A suspect was found in a dormitory closet and arrested more than 14 hours after the shooting — and several hours after university officials already had lifted a campus lockdown, saying that law enforcement did not believe there was an immediate threat.
The AP left email and telephone messages with Virginia State University administrators.
Camron Harris, 19, of Henrico, Virginia, was being held without bond in the Chesterfield County jail. He is due in state court Monday to face four counts of malicious wounding and four counts of using a firearm in the commission of a felony.
It could not be immediately determined if Harris has an attorney who could speak on his behalf, and efforts to reach his family by phone were unsuccessful.
Virginia State University is a historically Black university located in Ettrick, Virginia, about 24 miles (39 kilometers) south of the state capital of Richmond. The public university has about 5,700 students and was the first fully state-supported four-year college for Black Americans. Most of its students are undergraduates.
The victims ranged in age from 17 to 23 and only one of them was a student at the university, according to police. Harris was not a student, police said.
