UC Merced Stabbing Spree Suspect May Have Had Larger Plot, Officials Say

And now, it’s happened in a classroom at the University of California, Merced, where a student stabbed four people before campus police shot him to death.

SAN FRANCISCO – A freshman student who stabbed four people at a California university meant to do even more harm, but he acted alone and had no connections to terrorist groups, authorities said Thursday.

One student in the classroom was reported to have been stabbed by the suspect, and a contracted worker, upon hearing the commotion, was stabbed as he entered the scene believing the commotion to be a student fight.

“Our first concern is for (the victims’) full recovery”, Chancellor Dorothy Leland said Wednesday. Terrorism experts said the Twitter account had delivered previous ISIS propaganda, and this tweet was posted nearly immediately after the stabber’s name was released by officials.

Andrew Velasquez, who shared an on-campus suite with Mohammad, told Fresno television station KFSN-TV that he was quiet and anti-social.

All four of the victims are expected to recover from their wounds.

About Mohammad having been the attacker, Velasquez said: “Why would someone want to do that?”

Warnke said the bomb squad was called as a precaution because the suspect carried a backpack.

He had planned to hold students hostage by using the plastic ties to bind their hands to their desks during class on Wednesday morning.

UC Merced, which opened September 5, 2005, is the newest campus in the University of California system and is near Yosemite National Park.

The university cancelled classes for Wednesday and Thursday.

“I didn’t get a story from him, but it seemed like (Mohammad) tried to slash his throat”, Price said. As for why the students were targeted, Warnke said he did not yet know. It was his first year at the college after graduating from Wilcox High School this past June.

During a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, Sheriff-Coroner Vern Warnke said that the weapon used in the stabbings was a hunting knife between 8 and 10 inches long.

In the note, Mohammad said he anticipated a confrontation with police officers and planned to steal an officer’s gun before leaving the classroom to “do other tragedies on campus”, the sheriff said. “I looked him square in his eyes when he was attacking me”.

A student at Morgan State University in Maryland was charged in March with slashing two other students with a pocket knife outside a campus dining hall. And I never saw him walk with anybody. “Yet, in the wake of the tragic events at UC Merced, we are heartened by the way people have come together across the UC community to support the victims and their families”, Lozano said in a statement.

It has more than 6,600 students and is located about 120 miles south of Sacramento. The other student and the construction worker were treated and released, according to the university.

All the victims – Mr Price, two students and a female student advisor – suffered non-life-threatening injuries.

“This is something we have trained for, an incident such as this, just to be prepared on how we would react and how we would handle a situation such as this, of course we never expected this to happen, unfortunately it did”, Ortiz said.

2015 has seen a worrying number of serious attacks on USA college campuses.