“He seemed reasonable about it,” Rane said, according to a Jan. 30 Facebook conversation log. “So I think I might not die.”
On Tuesday, Green set several small fires in and around his house and then shot and killed Rane, a 22-year-old English major at U-Md. He also wounded another housemate before walking to the back of the home, where he killed himself.
Police said Wednesday that the wounded student was released from a hospital. An aunt and a cousin said Neal Oa, 22, of Frederick, Md., was recovering and declined to comment further. Friends said that Green, Rane and Oa didn’t know one another well, if at all, before they began leasing rooms at the house. They were the only ones home at the time of the shooting.
The incident has left police — and those who knew Green — searching for answers as to how a young man who showed so much promise could have fallen so rapidly. Former professors remembered Green, 23, as an average or above-average student who worked hard. He helped write an academic paper for a prominent engineering conference when he was an undergraduate at Morgan State University, they said. He dreamed of becoming a professor.
“I’m still shocked because I can’t believe that Dayvon is capable of doing that, but who knows?” said Madhumi Mitra, a biology and environmental sciences professor at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, who worked with Green during a summer research project in 2009. “The mind is very complex.”
The house where Green’s parents live in the Baltimore suburb of Rosedale remained virtually sealed Wednesday, its mailbox filling with notes from reporters. No one answered the door, and family members did not return multiple phone messages.
Rane’s family did not return calls, either, and a young man at the door of his family’s home in Silver Spring turned away a reporter. Carl S. Perkins, the principal at Howard County’s Centennial High School, said Rane was a 2009 graduate and was interested in music.
“He was a very nice kid,” Perkins said. “He kept to himself, yet he had lots of friends.”
Police said Green’s relatives told detectives that he suffered from some type of mental illness for about a year, and he took medication for his condition. Law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss the ongoing investigation, said family members thought he had schizophrenia, though detectives were probing the diagnosis and medication.
For the past year, the officials said, Green’s mental health seemed to deteriorate. But outward signs were scattered. University officials said Green never sought mental health treatment on campus.
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