DOVER Del.
One of the two students wounded in a shooting on the Delaware State University campus doesn’t know who the gunman was or what triggered the attack, his mother says.
Classes resumed Monday after being canceled Friday following the early morning shooting, school spokesman Carlos Holmes said. No arrests had been made.
The injured student, Nathaniel Pugh III, 17, was hospitalized at Kent General Hospital with two shattered ankle bones. Shalita Middleton, 17, also wounded by the shooting, was hospitalized with abdominal wounds.
Pugh, a freshman biology major from Washington, D.C., told his mother he was at the on-campus Village Cafe when he heard two gunshots around 1 a.m. and started running. He was hit in the ankle by a third shot, The Washington Post reported in its Monday editions.
“He didn’t see who shot him, but there were several students gathered there on the campus who could have seen who shot him,” Pugh’s mother, Michelle Blackwell, told the Post.
She said her son had never been involved in an altercation with another student.
“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Period,” she said.
Campus police Chief James Overton has said investigators believe the gunman is a Delaware State student who is no longer on campus. Authorities have not released a name.
University officials have said some kind of tension between students set off the attack and they planned to hold a campus meeting. The university has about 3,690 students.
Some students have said the shootings stemmed from a rivalry between students from Washington and New Jersey, although university police have said the investigation has not led them to believe there was a “turf battle.” Others have said a dispute followed a card game.
Holmes said Pugh has cooperated fully with police. He said Middleton was being treated for abdominal wounds at Christiana Hospital in Newark, Del., and has not been questioned and “will not be questioned until we get clearance from the physicians.”
On the Net:
Delaware State: https://www.desu.edu/
–Associated Press
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