A shooting early Sunday that marred homecoming weekend at Tuskegee University in Alabama left one person dead and left 16 others injured, a dozen of them by gunfire, authorities said. One arrest was announced hours later.
The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency said Jaquez Myrick, 25, of Montgomery, was taken into custody while leaving the scene of the campus shooting and had been found with a handgun with a machine gun conversion device.
The agency’s statement said Myrick faces a federal charge of possession of a machine gun. It did not say whether he was a student at the historically Black university, where the shooting erupted in the early hours on Sunday as the school’s 100th Homecoming Week was winding down. Authorities said an 18-year-old man who died was not a university student but that some of the injured were students.
It was not immediately known if Myrick had an attorney who could speak on his behalf.
Twelve people were wounded by gunfire, and four others sustained injuries not related to the gunshots, the state agency said earlier. Their conditions were not immediately released.
The FBI joined the investigation and said it is seeking tips from the public, as well as any video witnesses might have. It set up a site online for people to upload video.
Tuskegee University announced that classes Monday have been canceled. Grief counselors will be available to help students in the university’s chapel.
The parents of the victim were notified, and several of the wounded were being treated at East Alabama Medical Center in Opelika and Baptist South Hospital in Montgomery, the university said in a statement. An autopsy on the 18-year-old was planned at the state’s forensic center in Montgomery, Macon County Coroner Hal Bentley told the Associated Press on Sunday.
Tuskegee city’s police chief, Patrick Mardis, said the injured included a female student who was shot in the stomach and a male student who was shot in the arm.
City police were responding to an unrelated double shooting off campus when officers got the call about the university shooting at the West Commons on-campus apartments, Mardis said.