May 3 (UPI) — A woman was shot dead Wednesday morning at a community college in the Dallas area, in what authorities say was a murder-suicide.
The shooting occurred just before noon at North Lake College in the Dallas suburb of Irving. According to investigators, the gunman entered a campus building and shot the victim before shooting himself in the head.
“We have what appears to be one victim deceased & the shooter has committed suicide,” the Irving Police Department said via Twitter.
“There appears to be no continuing threat but police will continue to search to make the campus safe.”
Neither the gunman nor the victim were immediately identified, but police said the shooter was a man and the victim a woman.
Intruder Lock-Down. Stay away from campus. Irving PD says they are working on clearing each building on our campus. No confirmed injuries.
A math tutor said the gunman was talking with the sitting woman when he shot her three times. Teachers and students elsewhere in the building said they locked their classroom doors and took cover.
“It’s a tragedy from beginning to end,” student Miguel Villatoro told the Dallas Morning News. “You don’t expect it and now you’re that school.”
The shooting prompted a lockdown of the campus and classes were canceled for Wednesday and Thursday, the college said.
North Lake College, located about 12 miles northwest of downtown Dallas, is part of the County Community College District, which operates seven colleges in the Dallas area. The campus opened in 1977.
Wednesday’s shooting occurred almost a month after a female teacher and an 8-year-old boy were killed in a murder-suicide at an elementary school in San Bernardino, Calif. Monday, one person was stabbed to death at the University of Texas’s main campus in Austin.
