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Chief Kerr Putney of the Charlotte-Mecklenberg Police told reporters that Riley C. Howell was shot and killed trying to stop the gunman. “He took the assailant off his feet,” Putney said. “Absolutely, Mr. Howell saved lives.”
At the news conference Wednesday, the chief called Howell a hero and said that he did exactly what authorities train people to do. “You are going to run, you are going to hide and shield, or you are going to take your fight to the assailant,” the chief said. “Having no place to run and hide, he did the last.”
Putney said Howell, who he described as athletic, was probably the second victim to be fatally shot at the scene. Four others were injured.
“But for his work, the assailant may not have been disarmed,” the chief said. “Unfortunately, he gave his life in the process.”
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Here is what we know — and still don’t know — about the attack so far.
— The victims
The six people who were killed or wounded were all students at the university, officials confirmed Wednesday.
The university said that the two who were killed were Ellis R. Parlier, 19, of Midland, North Carolina, and Howell, 21, of Waynesville, North Carolina.
Parlier, who was known as Reed, graduated in 2017 from the Central Academy of Technology and Arts, a magnet high school in Monroe, North Carolina, where he studied computer technology, according to a spokeswoman for the Union County Public Schools.
Howell was an environmental studies student, the chancellor of the university, Philip Dubois, said Wednesday in an interview on WBT radio. Officials of the Buncombe County school district said Howell graduated from T.C. Roberson High School in Asheville in 2016, and that his mother works at a middle school in the district. The Asheville Citizen-Times reported that Howell played soccer and ran cross-country in high school.
The university identified the injured students as Sean DeHart, 20, and Drew Pescaro, 19, both of Apex, North Carolina; Emily Houpt, 23, of Charlotte; and Rami Alramadhan, 20, of Saihat, Saudi Arabia.
Dubois said in the radio interview that three of the injured had had surgery and were expected to recover fully, and the fourth, who was less seriously injured, had been treated at a hospital and released. He did not say which was which.
Alpha Tau Omega, a leadership fraternity, released a statement identifying Pescaro as a member of its Lambda Delta chapter. The student newspaper, The Niner Times, said he was a sports writer for the paper and reported that he was in stable condition after surgery.
Waleed Aldhafeeri, president of the Saudi Students Organization at the university, said that Alramadhan was recovering from wounds to his abdomen and right hand, and was expected to be released soon. He said Alramadhan was a freshman who had been enrolled in an intensive English language program at the university.
— The suspect
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg police identified the suspect in the shooting as Trystan Andrew Terrell, 22. He was disarmed and taken into custody at the scene late Tuesday.
Terrell spent most of his youth in Texas, and moved to North Carolina with his father after his mother died in 2011, his grandfather, Paul Rold, told The Associated Press.
Rold told the news agency that Terrell had enrolled in the university at some point and had shown an interest in foreign languages. But it was not immediately clear whether he was still enrolled at the time of the shooting.
The news agency reported that Rold said his grandson had never shown an interest in guns or other weapons. Reached Wednesday morning, Rold declined to comment further, saying, “You have to understand what my family is going through.”
Public records show that Terrell registered to vote in North Carolina in December 2014 and cast his ballot early in the 2016 election. The Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office, whose immediately available records go back three years, indicate that he had not been arrested in the county before Tuesday.
Sheriff Garry L. McFadden said in text messages on Wednesday that investigators were “going through the files to find answers.” The sheriff, a former homicide detective for the Charlotte police, said there was “no background information that would point to this happening.”
The Charlotte Observer quoted Chief Jeff Baker of the university’s Police and Public Safety Department as saying that Terrell was “not somebody on our radar.”
— The motive
Terrell was booked into a local jail early Wednesday, charged with two counts of murder, four counts of attempted first degree murder, four counts of assault with a deadly weapon, possession of a firearm on an educational property and discharging a firearm on an educational property. Authorities said at the news conference Wednesday afternoon that Terrell had legally purchased the handgun used in the attack.
Authorities have declined to speculate on the motive for the shooting, which took place on the final day of classes for the university’s spring term. The police said Terrell did not say anything at the scene when he was taken into custody.
At the news conference, Putney said Terrell had “some familiarity” with the building where the shooting took place, and the “choice of that building was by design, was intentional.”
“We can’t really discern the why just yet,” he said. “The randomness is what’s most concerning.”
As Terrell, manacled and surrounded by police officers, strode past television cameras and into a police building Tuesday evening to be booked, he turned and appeared to flash a smile.
— The scene
The shooting occurred in Kennedy Hall, the campus administration building, which also houses the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning.
Adam P. Johnson, an anthropology lecturer at the university, wrote on Twitter that the shooting happened in a class he was teaching on the role of science and technology in society, which met Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5:30 p.m. in Room 236 of Kennedy Hall.
The police said the gunman opened fire around 5:40. Johnson wrote that students were giving team presentations when the shooting began.
“The two killed were in the front,” Aldhafeeri of the Saudi Students Organization said Alramadhan told him during a hospital visit on Wednesday. “Rami told me, ‘He just got in the class and tried to shoot people.’ When they tried to get out of the class, he shot them.”
He said Alramadhan recognized the gunman as a student who had begun the term enrolled in the class but had dropped it about two months ago.
— The university
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte is a public university with an enrollment of about 30,000 students. It is the largest postsecondary educational institution in the Charlotte area.
The campus was locked down Tuesday night because of the shooting, but the lockdown was lifted by Wednesday morning. Joan F. Lorden, the school’s provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, said at a news conference late Tuesday that final exams scheduled through Sunday had been canceled, and that administrators were still considering plans for after that.
The university admits many foreign students, and Aldhafeeri said there were about 250 Saudi students enrolled this year. Though there were some initial concerns that Alramadhan might have been targeted for his Muslim faith, Aldhafeeri said it now appeared that the shootings were random.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.