Slain California university stabbing suspect studied engineering

Authorities say the student who stabbed and wounded four people at the University of California, Merced, was an 18-year-old freshman from the San Francisco Bay Area. He added that Mohammad was smart and got good grades.

This undated photo provided by the University of California, Merced shows freshman Faisal Mohammad of Santa Clara, California. He said investigators didn’t find any evidence of mental illness. The result of the federal probe found “nothing to indicate political or religious motivations to what he did”. The jelly can be lit afire and thrown, he said.

“I was listening to a podcast, and there was a break in talking, and I just hear a gunshot”, he said.

The sheriff also told of Mohammad praising Allah in his writings.

Federal agencies continued to assist in the investigation.

Student Lensy Maravilla, 19, said she was in a biology class on the second floor of the same building when a female student ran in. Warnke said the knife blade was eight to 10 inches long.

One of the assailant’s roommates, Andrew Velasquez, told KFSN that Mohammad was “antisocial” and didn’t talk much.

“I’ll never forget the look on her face”, he said. And I never saw him walk with anybody. The sheriff said the college freshman planned to tie students to their desks and draw police into the classroom where he planned on stabbing a police officer, taking his gun and then using it to shoot students in a dorm.

The four victims, including two students, one staff member and one construction worker, are all expected to recover, the university said. A male suspect was later shot and killed by police, according to a police report.

The university cancelled classes for Wednesday and Thursday.

Mohammad, who lived on campus, entered a classroom in the Classroom and Office Building at about 8 a.m. carrying a hunting knife with an 8-inch to 10-inch blade and stabbed one of the students, authorities said.

“His plan went haywire because people caught back”, said Sheriff Warnke.

“There is still nothing to indicate anything and I mean anything that this is other than a teenage boy that got upset with his fellow classmates and took it to the extreme”, said Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke.

Regardless, the stabbing attack was terrifying and disturbing on many levels, with Mohammad, who his roommate called “anti-social”, described as looking like he was enjoying himself as he cut the throat of the first student victim in a UC Merced classroom.

Ish Patel said Thursday that he met Mohammad in middle school in Santa Clara and was close friends with him throughout high school, but the two lost touch after graduation.

The sheriff’s department is investigating the shooting by the campus police officer, Warnke said.

The university’s chancellor Dorothy Leland said the stabbings were a troubling act of violence that had left the rural campus shaken. Initial reports said that five persons had been stabbed, but officials later amended the number of victims to four.

UC Merced has about 6,000 students and opened a decade ago in the state’s farm belt in response to the burgeoning enrollment in the nine other UC campuses.