(EPA)
MASSACRE: A cop, his weapon drawn, cautiously enters Oikos University (right) yesterday after a gunman went on a deadly rampage at the tiny Oakland campus, where a police sergeant later kept watch over several covered bodies. (
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A crazed former student opened fire at a small California Christian college yesterday, killing seven people and wounding three others, setting off an intense manhunt that ended quietly at a nearby shopping center.
The bloodbath began at around 10:30 a.m. at Oakland’s Oikos University after the gunman stormed its one building, shot a woman at the front desk and then ran from classroom to classroom blasting away at random victims.
People ran from the building in terror as police SWAT units smashed windows to reach cowering students and faculty.
“I’ve been shot, I’ve been shot,” a young woman cried as she sprinted from the college, near Oakland International Airport, crying, with a bloodied arm.
Passer-by Angie Johnson, 52, waited with the unidentified woman until a medical team arrived at the chaotic scene.
“She said he’d looked crazy all the time,” Johnson quoted the victim as saying. “But they never knew how far he would go.”
Another witness said the gunman lined students up against a wall before he opened fire.
Witness Art Richards was driving by the university when he saw a woman hiding in the bushes.
“I’m shot,” she told him.
“She had a piece of her arm hanging out,” Richards said, adding that she was wounded near the elbow.
She told him she saw the gunman shoot one person in the chest and another in the head.
Moments later, Richards said he heard about 10 shots coming from inside the building.
Cops arrested the suspect, identified as One L. Goh, 43, about five miles away in a supermarket in g Alameda about an hour later.
Officials said he approached store managers, told them what he had done and asked to be arrested.
A witness described him as serene while in the supermarket.
Officials said the suspect is a former Oikos student. The San Francisco Chronicle said he had been in a dispute with school officials and was kicked out.
“It’s going to take us a few days to put the pieces together,” Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan said. “We do not have a motive.”
Jordan described the building as “very bloody scene.”
He said police recovered a handgun they believe was used in the rampage. A source said the weapon was a .45-caliber.
The police chief said Goh, who used to live in Virginia, is a Korean national. Most of the school’s 100 or so students have a Korean background.
Officials withheld the names of the victims.
Television footage showed bloodied victims on stretchers being loaded into ambulances. Several bodies covered in sheets were laid out on a patch of grass at the school. One body could be seen being loaded into a van.
Tashi Wangchuk’s wife, Dechen, was in her vocational nursing class when she heard gunshots.
She locked the door and turned off the lights, she told him.
The gunman “banged on the door several times and started shooting outside and left,” he said.
Wangchuk said that no one was hurt inside his wife’s classroom.
“She’s a hero,’’ he said.
Dawinder Kaur’s family told the Oakland Tribune that she was being treated for a gunshot wound to her elbow.
Kaur told her relatives that Goh was a student who had been absent for months before yesterday.
Goh strode into her classroom and ordered students to line up against the wall, she said.
When he showed his gun, students began running and he opened fire, Kaur’s family said.
“She told me that a guy went crazy and she got shot,” brother Paul Singh told the newspaper. “She was running. She was crying; she was bleeding. It was wrong.”
With Post Wire Services