Three wounded in Texas shooting

Reuters

Students evacuate on foot at the Lone Star College North Harris campus in Houston, Texas. A shooting broke out between two people on the campus on Tuesday and there were three injuries, including one of the shooters, police and a school spokesperson said.

Houston - Shooting broke out between two people on the campus of Lone Star College near Houston on Tuesday and three people were injured, including one of the shooters, police said.

“We do have an ongoing situation at this time,” Harris County Sheriff's Office spokesperson Amando Tello said in a short briefing on the campus.

“We do have, we believe, three people injured at this time. We also have a person of interest that's being detained at this time,” Tello said. He gave no further details.

The nature of all the injuries was not clear.

The second shooter fled the campus, according to college spokesperson Jed Young. Neither police nor Young said whether the second shooter had been apprehended, and it was not clear if the two people involved in the shooting were students.

The shooting took place on the North Harris campus of the community college system, and the campus was evacuated, officials said.

Four schools in the Aldine district near Lone Star College were locked down, said Leticia Fehling, a spokesperson for the district. Officials have closed several roads near the college and school buses were not able to enter the area, she said.

Student Amanda Vasquez said she was waiting for an English class to start in a campus building when she heard shots.

“I heard about six shots... Kids started rushing down the hallway. It really happened so fast,” she told CNN news.

Vasquez said people in the classroom closed the door, turned off the lights and put a table against the door.

The shooting occurred just over a month after a gunman killed 20 students and six staff at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

The Lone Star College System is the largest institution of higher education in the Houston area, according to its website. Student enrollment is 90 000 and there are six colleges in the system.

There have been three separate shootings at schools and colleges in the United States in the past two weeks.

On January 10, a student armed with a shotgun opened fire at a California high school, wounding a fellow student. A second student also received minor injures at Taft Union High School in Taft, California, about 50km south-west of Bakersfield.

On January 15, a student armed with a pistol opened fire at the Stevens Institute of Business & Arts in downtown St Louis, shooting a school employee and then turning the gun on himself.

Also on January 15, two people were killed and a third wounded when gunfire broke out in the parking lot of a community college in eastern Kentucky. Authorities said that shooting was a result of a domestic conflict. - Reuters