del state shooting

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Delaware State Shooting Wounds Two; Gunman at Large (Update3)
By Nancy Moran
Sept. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Two Delaware State University students were shot by a gunman who remains at large, leading the 3,600-student Dover school to cancel classes and tell people to stay inside.
In a statement posted on its Web site, the university said campus police and the Dover Police Department were searching for a male assailant.
The shootings of a male and a female student were reported at about 12:54 a.m. near the university's Memorial Hall. The victims were taken to hospitals within the state. The female student's injuries are considered serious, while the male student is in stable condition, the school said.
Personnel and students were advised they can get updates on the situation through the university's Web site or by calling its weather-related telephone line at (302) 857-7669. Those not on campus were being told not to go there.
Delaware State's main 400-acre (160-hectare) campus is in Dover, the state capital. A historically black college established in 1891 as the State College for Colored Students, it's about 60 miles (96 kilometers) south of Philadelphia and has sites in Georgetown and Wilmington, Delaware.
On Aug. 4, three Delaware State students were shot execution-style behind a Newark, New Jersey, elementary school, leaving two of them dead. A fourth victim who was also killed had planned to attend the school.
Added Security Efforts
Campus security efforts have increased across the U.S. since April's shooting rampage at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, by student Seung Hui Cho. Cho killed 32 students and staff members before taking his own life.
A report by a Virginia state panel last month concluded that authorities there had waited too long to warn students of the attack because campus police lacked the authority to send a schoolwide alert.
In an effort to improve communications, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia introduced two Web sites last month for students and staff to register their contact information.
Tulane University in New Orleans and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are also among schools that will send students and personnel information by phone, e-mail and instant messaging in cases of emergency.
The Virginia Tech attack was modern America's worst mass shooting. Two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killed 13 people in a 1999 attack, the worst U.S. high school shooting.
To contact the reporter on this story: Nancy Moran in New York at nmoran@bloomberg.net .





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