Texas A&M Shooter Apprehended

Another day, another mass shooting in America. Details are sketchy.

Another day, another mass shooting in America. Details are sketchy.

CNN (“Multiple people shot near Texas A&M University“):

Police took a man into custody Monday after “multiple people” were shot near Texas A&M University, a police official said.

Several law enforcement officers were among the people shot, Rhonda Seaton of the College Station Police Department told CNN. She didn’t have information on how many people were shot or their conditions.

She said a person identified as the gunman was in custody. The shooting happened about one block from campus, Seaton said.

The university had warned people to stay away from the intersection of Welborn Road and George Bush Drive as well as part of Fidelity Drive in College Station, Texas.

AP (“Texas A&M: Active shooter on campus apprehended“):

Texas A&M University says a shooter has been taken into custody near its campus in College Station.

College Station police spokeswoman Rhonda Seaton tells CNN multiple people have been shot, including law enforcement, but she doesn’t know the extent of the injuries. Multiple calls to Seaton’s cellphone from The Associated Press have gone straight to voicemail.

The university issued an alert on its website just before 12:30 p.m. Monday warning of an active shooter near the campus football stadium, Kyle Field. The warning tells residents and students to avoid the area.

Seaton says the shooting happened within a block or two of campus sometime before 12:45 p.m. She says police have one suspect in custody.

More details as they emerge.

UPDATE: The Houston Chronicle (“Shooting near Texas A&M kills officer, civilian“) is reporting at least two dead.

 Police say at least one law enforcement officer and one civilian have been killed in a shooting near Texas A&M University’s campus.

As a side note: I dislike the use of the word “civilian” to distinguish citizens from the police.

UPDATE 2: As more details emerge, this is looking less like the “mass shooting” that I described in the opener and more like an eviction gone horribly wrong. CNN:

A Texas constable and two others were killed Monday in a shooting near Texas A&M University, police said.

Rhonda Seaton, a spokeswoman with the College Station police department, told CNN that the three people killed were the constable, the man authorities say exchanged gunfire with law enforcement officers and an unidentified civilian.

A few minutes earlier, Asst. Chief Scott McCollum, from the same police department, told reporters that multiple people had been shot in the incident, which occurred around noon just a few blocks from the Texas A&M campus.

The dead included Brian Bachman, a constable in Brazos County, according to McCollum. According to his Facebook campaign page, Bachmann was a 41-year-old Republican from College Station who had been a Brazos County sheriff’s deputy since 1993.

A male civilian was also killed, the assistant police chief said. A post on the city of College Station’s official Twitter page identified this third victim as a “civilian bystander.”

Three others were injured in the shooting. They included two law enforcement officers, including one who was shot in the leg, and a female civilian who was undergoing surgery at a hospital, according to McCollum.

[…]

When law enforcement officers arrived at the scene, they found the constable down in the front yard of a home, according to McCollum. The new officers engaged the suspected gunman, eventually shooting him and taking him into custody, police said.

Officer Jason James, with the Bryan police department, said “there is a possibility that it was an eviction.” He pointed out that 911 calls began coming in after officers had arrived on the scene, rather than officers responding to a shooting that neighbors told them about.

“It’s not like a disturbance where they were actually dispatched to it,” James said. “They weren’t responding to a shooting, but it turned into one.”

A sad story but something other than the nutcase on a rampage story that has played out all too many times.

FILED UNDER: Crime, Policing, , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. EddieInCA says:

    As of 11:55, here on the West Coast, CNN, MSNBC, nor Fox is running with any of this information. None of them.

    Are we at the point, as a nation, where a shooting spree is no longer important enough for the major cable news networks?

  2. How about asking the mainstream media to decline to recognize the shooter by refusing to print (or state) his name or picture? They could identify him by initials as “suspect shooter __ __” thus denying him any notoriety from this act.

  3. Ben Wolf says:

    I expect the shooter was none other than Barack Obama, enacting yet another evil plan to discredit guns and ban them. Oh, how indisious he is.

  4. Lit3Bolt says:

    Oh well, you can’t stop evil! Just can’t . Nope. Nothing to be done. Let’s just rock back and forth in our learned helplessness.

    The response of conservatives to Yet Another Random Insane Killing (YARIK) is will be from the La-La-La-I-Can’t-Hear-You school of thought.

  5. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Lit3Bolt: Ya beat me to it.

    In 2 weeks I am taking my granddaughter to the “Festival of Nations” in St Louis. It is a great time, celebrating the cultural differences of the world and how they marry together in St Louis. (I am not going to eat for a week before it… The food is to die for)(let us hope not literally). I am not going to let this bullshit keep me away, but I am going to have a second pair of eyes surgically implanted in the back of my head.

  6. Ben Wolf says:

    @Ben Wolf: Oops, “Indisious” should have been spelled “Insidious”.

  7. Looking at the news, it looks like they shot one person and then a cop responded and they and the shooter shot each other. It’s seems somewhat sensationalist to describe that as a “mass shooting”.

  8. Ernieyeball says:

    @Stormy Dragon: How many rounds have to be fired by any number of shooters at anyone to be a mass shooting? You seem to want to be the one to draw the lines.

  9. @Ernieyeball:

    The term creates a mental image of someone trying to shoot as many random people as possible. That could be what happened here and the shooter just got stopped almost immediately, or it could have been “garden-variety” crime. Until we know one way or the other, it seems a bad idea to pre-categorize it.

  10. @Stormy Dragon:

    Now the news has updated, the police were trying to arrest the guy when he pulled a gun, hitting one of the officers and a bystander before the other officer shot him. So yeah, describing this as a mass shooting (in that he did hit more than one person) may be technically accurate by highly misleading description of the situation.

  11. matt says:

    @Stormy Dragon: Indeed this kind of stuff happens every week in Chicago LA or NY…

  12. matt says:

    My favorite part is how CNN breaking news declared “MASS SHOOTER WITH AUTOMATIC WEAPON AT TEXAS A&M”.. Fortunately that headline was removed a while back..

  13. al-Ameda says:

    As more details emerge, this is looking less like the “mass shooting” that I described in the opener and more like an eviction gone horribly wrong.

    Well then, If only the landlord had been armed …

  14. wr says:

    @Ben Wolf: I like indisious. Just because it isn’t a word is no reason that we shouldn’t make it one.

  15. bill says:

    you could almost feel the collective big media let down when they found out it wasn’t really on the campus and the shooter was a wacko (aren’t they all anyway?) who was getting evicted. the story died fasted than the shooter did, too bad he got a constable and his landlord before he got his due.