What We Know About the Shooting at U.N.C. Charlotte - The New York Times

Two people were killed and four others injured on Tuesday when a man opened fire with a handgun at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the authorities said. Here is what we know so far.

The victims

The chancellor of the university, Philip Dubois, identified the six victims in an interview on WBT radio on Wednesday. He said they were all students at the university.

He named the two who were killed as Ellis R. Parlier, 19, of Midland, N.C., and Riley C. Howell, 21, of Waynesville, N.C.

The injured, he said, were Sean DeHart, 20, and Drew Pescaro, 19, both of Apex, N.C.; Emily Houpt, 23, of Charlotte; and Rami Alramadhan, 20, of Saihat, Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Dubois said in the interview that three of the injured had had surgery and were expected to recover fully, and the fourth, who was less seriously injured, had been treated and released. He did not say which was which.

Alpha Tau Omega, a leadership fraternity, released a statement identifying Mr. Pescaro as a member of its Lambda Delta chapter. The student newspaper, The Niner Times, said he was a sportswriter for the paper and reported that he was in stable condition after surgery.

The suspect

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg police identified the suspect in the shooting as Trystan Andrew Terrell, 22. He was disarmed and taken into custody at the scene late Tuesday.

Mr. Terrell spent most of his youth in Texas, and moved to North Carolina with his father after his mother died in 2011, his grandfather, Paul Rold, told The Associated Press.

Mr. Rold told the news agency that Mr. Terrell had enrolled in the university at some point and had shown an interest in foreign languages. But it was not immediately clear whether he was still enrolled at the time of the shooting.

The news agency quoted Mr. Rold saying that he did know his grandson to be a weapons enthusiast. Reached on Wednesday morning, Mr. Rold declined to comment further, saying, “You have to understand what my family is going through.”

Public records show that Mr. Terrell registered to vote in North Carolina in December 2014 and cast his ballot early in the 2016 election. The Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office, whose immediately available records go back three years, indicate that he had not been arrested in the county before Tuesday.

Sheriff Garry L. McFadden said in text messages on Wednesday that investigators were “going through the files to find answers.” The sheriff, a former homicide detective for the Charlotte police, said there was “no background information that would point to this happening.”

The Charlotte Observer quoted Chief Jeff Baker of the university’s Police and Public Safety Department as saying that Mr. Terrell was “not somebody on our radar.”

Video player loading — A gunman killed two people and injured four others on the last day of classes at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. The police have taken a suspect into custody, but have not revealed a possible motive for the shooting.CreditCreditTravis Dove for The New York Times

The charges

Mr. Terrell was booked into a local jail early on Wednesday, charged with two counts of murder, four counts of attempted first degree murder, four counts of assault with a deadly weapon, possession of a firearm on an educational property and discharging a firearm on an educational property.

The motive

The authorities have declined to speculate on the motive for the shooting, which took place on the final day of classes for the university’s spring term. The police said Mr. Terrell did not say anything at the scene when he was taken into custody.

As Mr. Terrell, manacled and surrounded by police officers, strode past television cameras and into a police building on Tuesday evening to be booked, he turned and appeared to flash a smile.

The scene

The shooting took place in Kennedy Hall, the campus administration building, which also houses the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

Adam P. Johnson, an anthropolgy lecturer at the university, wrote on Twitter that the shooting happened in a class he was teaching on the role of science and technology in society, which met Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5:30 p.m. in Room 236 of Kennedy Hall.

The police said the gunman opened fire around 5:40. Mr. Johnson wrote that students were giving team presentations when the shooting began.

The university

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte is a public university with an enrollment of about 30,000 students. It is the largest postsecondary educational institution in the Charlotte area.

The campus was locked down Tuesday night because of the shooting, but the lockdown was lifted by Wednesday morning. Joan F. Lorden, the school’s provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, said at a news conference late Tuesday that final exams scheduled through Sunday had been canceled, and that administrators were still considering plans for after that.

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