All four persons who were injured in a stabbing at the University of California, Merced, are expected to recover fully, campus officials say.
Advertisement
One of the student victims and the construction worker were treated and released from local hospitals, while the other two are still receiving treatment. She says the students chasing the man backed off when two campus police officers took over the pursuit.
In a manifesto found in 18-year-old Mohammed’s pocket during his autopsy, authorities found a two-page, detailed document that included a list of his targets and his intentions, said Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke.
Mohammad was thwarted by a chair thrown in front of him and a construction worker who heard the commotion and intervened.
Construction worker and stabbing victim, Byron Price, pictured with his fiance, confronted the UC Merced stabbing suspect, and is being praised for likely preventing the death of a UC Merced student stabbing victim.
The student also wrote in the manifesto his planned actions during the attack, including the words he would have said to students, taking a police officer’s gun and the uses for the contents of his backpack.
Mohammad’s plan was written in English and referenced the Muslim God Allah several times, Warnke said, but the teen was motivated by personal animosities.
Officials said background checks with the help of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Homeland Security showed the 18-year-old had no connections to organized hate or terror groups and no past behavior to suggest he would lash out violently.
But, Warnke said, things did not go as planned.
Mohammad turned 18 last week and graduated in June from Wilcox High School in Santa Clara.
The campus community is coming together even though the students, faculty and staff are shaken, said Brenda Ortiz, a University Communications senior public information representative.
A college freshman angered over his eviction from a study group planned to kill a police officer, steal a gun and shoot those who had evicted him, according to a document found on his body after police shot him dead.
After the attack in the classroom, the plan was to go elsewhere on campus, including a dormitory, and cause of “tragedies”, Warnke said.
“This was a teenage boy that got upset with other classmates and took it to the extreme”, Warnke said.
Maravilla said the student ‘was crying hysterically and came in and said that she had seen somebody get stabbed, or slashed, in the throat and she ran’. “I also saw fear”, Price said.
Mohammad’s roommate at the university, Andrew Velasquez, told KSFN-TV the engineering student kept mostly to himself, the two rarely spoke, and he never saw the freshman walking to class with anyone.
Patel said Mohammad was friendly and loved basketball, going to the mosque to pray and playing video games with his friends.
The staff member suffered a collapsed lung and had surgery, the school said.
The campus opened a decade ago and is the newest college in the University of California system.
Classes were canceled until Friday at the university about 120 miles south of Sacramento in the San Joaquin Valley.
Advertisement
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.
