2 Delaware State Students From D.C. Hurt in First Such Incident Since Va. Tech Case
By Daniel de Vise and Susan Kinzie
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 22, 2007
DOVER, Del., Sept. 21 -- A fight over a card game escalated into a shooting Friday at Delaware State University that left two 17-year-old students from the District injured and prompted authorities to shut down the campus.
The victims were Shalita Middleton and Nathaniel Pugh, a D.C. schools spokesman said. Middleton, who was a cheerleader at Woodrow Wilson High School, was shot twice in the stomach and was in a hospital in serious condition. Pugh, who attended Dunbar High School, according to the spokesman, John Stokes, was shot in the leg and ankle. The dispute arose at a game night Tuesday, students said.
It was the country's first campus shooting since a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in April, and the university's response showed how much that day has saturated campus life. Less than an hour after the police received a call about the shooting around 1 a.m., administrators met and sent warnings by flier, Web site and phone and in person, knocking on doors in dorms. The lesson they learned from Virginia Tech, university spokesman Carlos Holmes said, was: "Don't wait."
Many students said their first thought was of Virginia Tech, of a gunman on a rampage. But the case was quite different: It happened at night and did not appear to be a random shooting.
"This was not an act of terrorism," said the campus's police chief, James Overton. "This was not a crazed gunman who found his way onto campus. . . . This was a Delaware State student who caused this action."
Students remained locked in their dorm rooms for much of the day Friday, with classes canceled, nonessential employees told to stay home and access to the historically black university restricted. Of the 3,700 students, 1,200 live on campus.
By Friday evening, two students identified by the police as "persons of interest" had been taken into custody. Still, officials said classes would be canceled Saturday.
Darryl Salley, a freshman from Washington who has been friends with Middleton since childhood, said the fight began after a game of Spades.
Police said the shooting happened after a group of eight to 10 students left the Village Cafe, a dining hall on the campus, shortly before 1 a.m. Four to six shots were fired at the Campus Mall, a pedestrian area, Overton said.
Ryan Robinson, a freshman from Bear, Del., had climbed into bed after writing a paper when he heard three gunshots. "Three seconds later" officers were there, he said, and he felt safe enough to peer out the window. "You just saw everybody running to their dorms, trying to get out of the way. . . . Maybe 150 people were outside trying to see what was going on."
In the chaos, he saw Pugh on the ground. He saw students pick Pugh up and carry him to a dormitory. "I just wanted to stay low," Robinson said, "get out of the way."
Minutes after the shooting, he heard a knock at the door. He immediately thought of the shootings at Virginia Tech, and he refused to open the door until he learned that the person outside was his hall adviser.
Salley was in the cafe when the shooting happened. He came out to find his friend on the ground. "They had Shalita on the floor, and my friend Fats was holding her," he said. "She was just laying there."
He said other students carried Pugh to Evers Hall. "After that, the ambulance came to get [Pugh] and a helicopter came and got Shalita. And then they told everybody to go back to the dorm."
Middleton was taken to Christiana Hospital in Newark, Del., with serious wounds. "They could potentially be life-threatening," Holmes, the university spokesman, said.
Carolyn Dowdle, a neighbor of Middleton's mother, said she had talked with her several times yesterday and was told about Middleton's condition and surgeries.
At Wilson High on Friday, the school psychologist consoled members of the cheerleading squad. Sharron Pittman-Brice, the head cheerleading coach, said that when Middleton tried out, "I'll never forget, she came to me and said, 'I'm Shalita Middleton, and I'm representing the big girls.' That became her nickname. We called her BG for big girl. . . . She was the best. She had all the energy in the world."
Middleton was an outgoing student who was intent on attending Delaware State, said Ravyn Hall, an adviser with the nonprofit D.C. College Access Program. "She's a fighter, and when she has the willpower, she can't be stopped. I just pray that she pulls through," Hall said.
Pugh was taken to Kent General Hospital in Dover.
Salley said the two wounded students are friends. "Everybody knows who did the shooting. But nobody told. . . . Depending on where you come from, it's not the right thing to do," he said.
This was "students against students," said Allen L. Sessoms, the school's president.
"This is safer than some of the places they come back to. But they bring some of the tensions and some of the issues with them to campus. . . . This is a case of our students making very poor choices and acting incredibly badly."
Delaware State started the school year in mourning, after four current and incoming students were shot execution-style at an elementary school in Newark, N.J., in August.
"We're still not over that shooting in Jersey," said senior Franz Delima, a physics and engineering major. "We still haven't gotten over that, and now this thing happens."
He said he was impressed by how quickly the school responded. "That's one of the mistakes Virginia Tech made -- they didn't lock down campus," he said.
In the months since that attack, which brought harsh criticism to Virginia Tech's administration for not warning students that a gunman was at large, many college administrators added crisis alert systems.
Schools revamped Web sites, added security officers and updated emergency plans made after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Students at George Mason, Georgetown, George Washington and Catholic universities and at the University of Maryland, among other schools, can sign up for cellphone text-message alerts. Some schools, such as Georgetown and American, have held simulated campus shootings with city police officers.
Delaware State officials said they used "multiple redundancies" to notify people, but they did not send either text messages or e-mails to all students, which some students said would have been the quickest way to notify everyone.
"We can't assume people are going to read their e-mails at 1 a.m.," Sessoms said. "We went around and knocked on doors."
Staff writers Theola Labb¿, Sylvia Moreno and Jonathan Mummolo and staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report from Washington.
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