Student fatally shot on MSU campus
Published: Sunday, March 25, 2012
Updated: Sunday, March 25, 2012 14:0
A first semester transfer student was fatally shot multiple times Saturday night in a first floor Evans Hall residence room on Mississippi State University's campus and died later.
John Sanderson, 21, of Madison was found outside the residence hall room and was transported to OCH Regional Medical Center where the doctors worked with him for around 40 minutes before he was pronounced dead at 11:03 p.m., Bill Kibler, vice president of student affairs, said.
The investigation has gained two leads. A gun has been found on campus and a person of interest has been identified. Kibler said anyone with information that involves an African American male seeking a ride, particularly one to Jackson, should contact authorities.
“Our goal is obviously to identify the suspects and bring them into custody immediately so that we can put all of this together,” Kibler said.
Suspects have been identified as three black males who fled Evans Hall in a late model blue Crown Victoria. Maridith Geuder, university spokesperson, said at this time the suspects are not believed to be students.
Kibler said there were witnesses to the event that helped determine that the incident was isolated.
“The perpetrators fled not only the scene, but campus, and probably the city of Starkville immediately,” he said.
The MSU Police Department was notified of an incident at Evans Hall at 9:54 p.m. The police arrived within one minute of receiving the emergency call. Sanderson was found with serious injuries, which at the time could not be determined whether he had been stabbed or shot.
The investigation began immediately after the welfare of the victim was taken care of, Kibler said. Campus was placed on alert and patrols on campus — including stepping up foot patrols in residence halls — increased significantly.
The suspects are still at large, but the campus is not under an emergency alert at this time.
Kibler said officials chose to release the first Maroon Alert text message in order to alert the campus of a crime, despite not knowing if it was a shooting or a stabbing for safety reasons.
“We err on the side of safety always,” he said. “We knew those who had performed this act had not yet been identified, so we needed to send that information out to the campus.”
Twenty-four students in Evans Hall have been asked to be relocated to enhance and protect the integrity of the investigation.
The motivation, along with surveillance video tapes from Evans Hall, are part of the investigation and have not been released to the public at this time.
The investigation is ongoing, being led by the university police with assistance from the Starkville Police Department, the Oktibbeha County Sheriff's Office and the Mississippi Highway Patrol.
MSU President Mark Keenum said the campus is known as a safe place and said he wants to assure students, parents, faculty and staff it continues to be safe.
“This is the first time in our school's history that such a tragic incident has occurred involving a student being shot on our campus,” he said.
He said the campus goes to great lengths to promote safety.
“Our Bulldog family is saddened by this event and the loss of one of our students. Our hearts go out to John Sanderson's family and friends and they will continue to be in our prayers,” he said. “Our top priority is the safety and well-being of our campus and all who inhabit it.”
Kibler said residence halls have three levels of card-access security during the night — one needs a student ID card to access the building, wing, then room. Visitors can be escorted into residence halls by students who live there and surveillance video cameras are mounted at entrances. He said there is no reason to believe there was breech of security during the incident.
Kibler said there have been no reports that any of the Maroon Alerts failed.
“We monitor that system carefully. We have the exact times when the button was pushed to send those. We send out tens of thousands, so there may have been a several minute gap. There were not reports of a systematic failure,” he said.
The Reflector will continue to update more information as it becomes available.
who cares if a white guy or jewish kids are murdered, they deserve it for oppressing people of color for thousands of years......
ReplyDeleteWatched a documentary on Aileen "Lee" Carol Wuornos last night.
ReplyDeleteFuck, that was depressing.
When the shooter is white and the victim black, CNN does an entire section
ReplyDeleteTRAYVON MARTIN SHOOTING
* Martin's family to speak at city meeting
* WH: Candidates' remarks 'irresponsible’
* Group calls for citizen's arrest
* Incident sparks rallies across U.S.
* Echoes of Emmett Till?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
ReplyDeleteAs an act of pure evil it was difficult to match.
After dragging the 8-year-old by her hair across a schoolyard, the killer put a 9 mm pistol to the girl’s head and pulled the trigger.
The gun jammed. So he took out a Colt .45 and finished her.
She was one of four victims. The others — a 30-year-old rabbi and his two boys.
As the gunman had targeted a Jewish school and the bullets were identical to those used in the murders of two North African soldiers and one black soldier, suspicion fell on some neo-Nazi racist.
And in France’s tight presidential campaign, left and center moved swiftly to exploit the atrocities by charging the French right with creating an atmosphere in which such racist horrors can occur.
“Killings Could Stall Election’s Nationalist Turn,” ran the New York Times headline. The debate over whether the murders were “inspired by anti-immigrant political talk is likely to continue,” wrote the Times’ Steve Erlanger, “both as a weapon in the presidential campaign and as a more general soul-searching about the nature of France.”
French President Nicolas Sarkozy was thrown on the defensive.
These murders, said centrist candidate Francois Bayrou, “because of their origin, of the religion of their family,” are linked “to a growing climate of intolerance.”
Politicians “have the duty to make sure that tensions, passions, hatred should not be kept alive at every moment. To point the finger at one or another according to their origins is to inflame passions, and we do it because in that flame there are votes to get.”
The massacre at the Jewish school and the murders of Muslim and black soldiers, said the head of France’s Council of Muslim Democrats, “are a strong signal sent to politicians and, more particularly, to those who, for several months, have played with fire.”
And who had “played with fire”?
Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen, candidate of the rightist National Front.
Sarkozy has been toughening his stance on immigration and national identity. In a March 7 debate, he said that there are “too many foreigners” in France and that assimilation is “working worse and worse.”
He pledged to cut immigration in half.
Last summer, Sarkozy sought to deport Gypsies who had overstayed their visas. In echo of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he has called multiculturalism a failure.
He has spoken of revising the Schengen agreement, which lets residents of the European Union travel freely across borders. He has denounced burqas and facial veils worn by Muslim women. Boys and girls, he says, should swim together, a practice intolerable to devout Muslims.
With his rightward move to siphon votes from Le Pen, Sarkozy had surged into a tie with Socialist Francois Hollande.
{…}
{…} So it was that the left leapt with alacrity upon the massacre to charge that Sarkozy’s new populism had created the climate in which such horrors against Jews and Muslims can occur.
ReplyDeleteSo it was that the Times concluded that the nationalist turn in French politics might be halted, as it had in Norway after berserker Anders Breivik slaughtered scores of children last year.
What was happening should be readily recognizable to Americans.
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a Marxist in Dallas, the Goldwater right was charged with creating an atmosphere of hate that had made it likelier to happen there. When Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot by a crazed gunman who wounded a dozen others and slaughtered six, moral responsibility was laid at the feet of Sarah Palin.
Unfortunately for the French left, however, by Wednesday, the mass murderer had been identified as a homegrown Salafist jihadi and self-styled member of al-Qaida who had spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan and been under surveillance for years by French intelligence.
Mohamed Merah was seeking revenge against Jews for the deaths of Palestinian children and against French soldiers for fighting in Afghanistan.
Le Pen seized on the news to blast the left, which had sought to blame the atrocities on her, and charged the French government with underestimating the Islamist threat and being lax on national security.
“It is time to wage war on these fundamentalist political religious groups who are killing our children,” she said.
“The threat of Islamic fundamentalism has been underestimated. … (I) have been talking about this for months and months, and the political class has rejected (me). Some are going to have difficulty explaining themselves, but I have a clear conscience.”
With the killer precisely the type of individual the French right has said bears watching, Bayrou was hastily backtracking:
Politicians must “tackle the risk of importing into French society conflicts that are foreign to us or should be foreign to us.”
As Europe’s native citizens age and die and immigration goes on and on — with 5 million Muslims already in France — issues of national identity will bedevil Europe, even as they will bedevil us, forever.
In Toulouse we see clearly now not only the dark side of diversity but perhaps the future of the West.
Ash
ReplyDeleteFor the record, I never post as anon or anyone else, except Gag Reflex. So go fuck yourself, you narrow minded intolerant dipshit.