Students expressed sorrow and dismay after a shooting at Morgan State University, a historically Black university in Baltimore, Md., on Oct. 3, where five people were injured outside a homecoming event at the school. The Baltimore Police Department has not yet identified the two shooters and is asking for anyone with knowledge that could be helpful to come forward.
Four men and one woman, all of whom are aged 18 to 22 and four of whom are students, sustained non-life-threatening injuries and were all taken to the hospital. The Morgan State University police chief has confirmed four of the five were released as of Friday morning and one remains hospitalized in stable condition.
Later that week, two 19-year-old men were injured in an on-campus shooting at Bowie State University, Maryland’s oldest historically Black university in Bowie, Md. The shooting occurred around 11:30 p.m. on Oct. 7, when campus police received a report of shots fired on campus and brought the victims to the hospital for treatment. There is currently no suspect and the conditions of the two victims are unknown, though state police do not believe the men are students at either Bowie State or Morgan State.
In response to the Morgan State shooting, Dean of Students G.L. Black sent out an email on Oct. 4 to students to offer support and resources.
“Any time violence occurs on any college campus, it is unsettling, and it raises questions about our own emergency protocols,” Black said. “The safety and well-being of all members of the Vanderbilt community are our priority.”
Additionally, Black addressed Vanderbilt’s current safety protocols in his email, citing the AlertVU system triggered in case of an active shooter or other danger to the community and the university’s active shooter guidelines. These guidelines were announced on June 21 as part of the campus-wide security review.
Junior Jake Macek, a Baltimore City resident, expressed his shock and dismay about the shooting, particularly from the perspective of both a resident and a current college student.
“While I haven’t personally experienced gun violence myself, I’ve become familiar with deaths due to gun violence — it’s something that happens far too frequently in Baltimore, and occurs at a disproportionate rate among the Black population,” Macek said. “And as much as my heart hurts for my city and those students at Morgan State, it also hurts for college students all across the country.”
Macek also noted the similarities between this shooting and the others at college campuses this year, including at Michigan State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“We’ve had to bear the burden of seeing gun violence unfold throughout the nation, listening to students at the University of Virginia and Michigan State who shared their traumatizing testimonies of the events that occurred,” Macek said. “It’s easy to begin to disassociate from these violent events when there are so many of them occurring each year, but we have to continue reminding ourselves that this isn’t normal.”
