2 men in custody after shooting near California university
May 12, 2015, 9:42 AM
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) — Two students were shot and two suspects arrested near the University of California, Santa Barbara, the same community where a stabbing and shooting rampage left six students dead a year ago.
One university student was shot once in the stomach, the other once in the chest Monday night after fighting with two men who came to their apartment a few blocks from campus, authorities said.
Neither of the suspects are students, and the shootings had nothing to do with last year’s killings in the community of Isla Vista, authorities said.
One of the suspects fled, and the other was held by neighbors until police arrived. James Joshua Taylor, 22, of Lompoc was arrested and taken to a hospital for head injuries he got in the fight.
The second suspect drove away in a white sedan, prompting a search of the campus and a lockdown of student dormitories for about two hours.
Jose Guadalupe Gutierrez, 19, later checked himself into a hospital with unspecified injuries, Santa Barbara County sheriff’s spokeswoman Kelly Hoover said early Tuesday. The Goleta resident was connected to the crimes and arrested.
The victims, who are both in their early 20s but whose names were not released, received gunshot wounds that were not life-threatening and were hospitalized Tuesday, Hoover said.
UCSB student Collin Mack, who lives nearby, said he and friends went outside after hearing sirens and saw the victims sprawled on the front steps of their apartment.
“They looked like they had been shot,” Mack told KABC-TV (http://bit.ly/1bMCT5x ). “We saw bloody clothing. But it didn’t look super serious, because when we saw them go into the ambulance they looked pretty stable.”
Investigators have not identified a motive for the shootings, but recovered a handgun at the scene.
Gutierrez and Taylor could face charges including attempted murder, robbery and participation in a criminal street gang, Hoover said. It wasn’t immediately known if they have lawyers.
The violence occurred in the same place as last May’s rampage: a square-mile community of small apartments and houses that is home to thousands of university students. There, Elliot Rodger killed six UCSB students and wounded 14 other people before killing himself.
Rodger stabbed his two roommates and their friend, then gunned down two women outside a sorority house and shot a man standing in a deli as he drove through town, firing a semi-automatic handgun and plowing into pedestrians with his BMW.
Rodger, who wasn’t a student or alumnus, had posted a manifesto and a series of online videos voicing contempt for everyone from his roommates to the human race but reserving special hate for two groups: the women he says kept him a virgin and the men they chose instead.
In one video, he said, “I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you.”
In a final handwritten journal entry on May 23, he wrote: “This is it. In one hour I will have my revenge on this cruel world. I HATE YOU ALLLL! DIE.”
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