Nikia Reed was at home watching a movie Tuesday night when she began receiving texts asking if her daughter was safe.
“My heart sunk when I saw those messages,” she told USA TODAY.
Her daughter, Melody Cole, is a freshman at Morgan Statue University, where five people, including four students, were wounded during a shooting Tuesday night. The victims are expected to survive, police said. No arrests have been made and authorities have not released any details about a potential suspect or suspects, as of Wednesday morning. Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley at a news conference told reporters investigators didn't know how many shooters were involved.
Cole had just stopped into her room to get ready for another homecoming week party when the campus was put under a lockdown that lasted for several hours. Within minutes Cole called her mother to tell her she was safe in her room as police began to comb a neighboring dorm building after the shooting erupted on campus.
“She was really shaken scared,” Reed, 43, said, adding she remained on the phone with her daughter throughout the night. “I was devastated because I just couldn't believe what was going on. At that moment, I just wanted to just bring her home and just keep her here."
Classes were canceled for Wednesday but Reed said she hopes that's extended through the rest of the week, especially because no one’s been taken into custody.
“I'm sorry, I know it's homecoming, but I just don't feel safe with my daughter being there,” she said. “It's sad that we send our kids to school to get an education and they can't even feel safe going there.”
The incident happened at around 9:25 p.m. and victims were found "within-minutes," Worley said. Each of the five victims, between 18-22 years old, sustained non-life-threatening injuries.
When officers heard gunshots and discovered dorm windows shattered, police initially thought there was an active shooter on campus and issued a shelter-in-place order. SWAT officers cleared a dorm building where investigators believed a suspect may have been hiding but none were found.
The incident occurred just after the coronation of Mister & Miss Morgan State at the Murphy Fine Arts Center, as students were heading to a campus ball. The event, which draws parents from around the country to celebrate students and their achievements, packed the campus auditorium nearly to capacity, said MSU President David Wilson at a news conference.
"This was an unbelievably beautiful event this evening," Wilson said. "Our students at the end of (the event) were headed over to the student center to rejoice and enjoy themselves when this unfortunate situation erupted on the campus."
Konnor Crowder, a sophomore from Baltimore, told the Associated Press he and his friends had been waiting for the coronation ball to start when they saw people running.
“First I was wondering what they were running for," he said, "then I was wondering where we should go."
Morgan State University is a public historically black university, or HBCU, in Baltimore, Maryland. It is the largest HBCU in the state and the campus is located in a residential area of northeast Baltimore. The university reported an enrollment of more than 9,000 students as of late 2022.
At a news conference Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott noted recent declines in the city’s homicide rate and said the shooting Tuesday indicates a need for national gun reform.
“We have to deal with this issue nationally,” he said. “We have to get serious about guns.”
There have been at least 531 mass shootings in the United States with at least four victims since Jan. 1, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit publicly sourced database that defines a mass shooting as at least four people struck by gunfire, not including the shooter. Over a dozen shootings occurred at colleges or universities this year.
Kris Brown, the president of Brady, a gun control advocacy nonprofit, in a statement said, “The horror and trauma of a mass shooting is unfortunately not a new experience for many of America’s youth," adding: "This is especially true for Black youth."
"It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that this shooting took place during homecoming week for a generation that has been raised on school shooting drills and mass shootings," Brown continued. "Our hearts go out to the victims and families of this senseless shooting.”
Contributing: The Associated Press; Thao Nguyen, USA TODAY