Pat Dollard | Young Americans

(PalmBeachPost)

Students spend night locked down as FAU police look for shooter …

BOCA RATON - Florida Atlantic University’s Boca Raton campus is locked down while police search for a man who opened fire at a party in a residence hall.

University police report that a fight broke out at a party at the University Village Apartments on the east side of campus when someone called 911 to report gun shots, Deputy Police Chief Keith Totten said Wednesday morning.

One person was grazed by a bullet, but the injury was not enough to warrant a trip to the hospital, Totten said.

The shooter took off, and though police responded within two minutes of the emergency call and immediately ordered a lock down, they don’t know whether the shooter made it off campus, Totten said.

So as the sun came up Wednesday, no one was being allowed on or off campus. All four main entrances to the campus east of Interstate 95 were closed. Classes have been canceled - right in the middle of final exams week, Totten said.

(FAU police released this surveillance video image of a 6′1″ male suspected in the overnight shooting.)

The lock-down has pinned FAU student Kevin Cho Tipton the school’s Student Union all night. He was pulling an all-nighter studying for finals with about eight friends when he heard the school’s new emergency alert siren go off and friends started calling saying there was something going on on campus.

About an hour later, he said, he got the university’s official e-mail message alerting students to the shooting and found out he and his friends would be staying put for a while.

The sirens, which were activated 25 minutes after the call to police, and the public address and emails to student and faculty are part of a campus-wide security upgrade that was just completed six weeks ago, Totten said. They came as a response to the Virginia Tech and other campus shootings across the country.

This shooting was more of an isolated incident, police say.

“Right now I hear they’re going door to door looking for the guy,” said Cho Tipton, who plans to keep studying for his political science and speech final. “Our friends were texting us and then Facebook just lit up with messages saying ëDon’t go to FAU, beware, there’s something happening on campus.”

Cho Tipton said students who were locked down in the campus library were allowed to leave at about 5 a.m. this morning, but he and his friends haven’t been allowed to leave the Student Union.

“There are vending machines here, so it’s not so bad,” he said.

The shooter hasn’t been found, but his mug was captured on closed circuit surveillance video, Totten said. And his mug is being posted around campus in hopes that someone may be able to identify him, Totten said.

FAU’s statement on the shooting