2 Die in Arkansas Campus Shooting

By MELISSA NELSON, Associated Press Writer

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (AP) – Two people
believed to be a professor and a graduate student
were shot to death Monday at the University of
Arkansas in an apparent murder-suicide on the
first day of the fall semester, authorities said.

The shots were fired in the office of an English professor on the second floor
of Kimpel Hall, a classroom and office building near the heart of the campus.

“I heard one gunshot followed by a young man’s voice saying, `No, I didn’t
do anything,”’ said Bethany Edstrom, a graduate student who was in a nearby
office. “Then I heard a second shot.”

Officers responding to a 911 call a couple of minutes later said they spoke
briefly with a man behind the locked office door, Capt. Brad Bruns said.
Less than five minutes later, another shot rang out. Officers found two men
dead inside.

It wasn’t immediately clear who had made the emergency call or what had
prompted it.

Students and faculty were evacuated from the building after the shooting, and
classes there and in an adjacent building were canceled.

“We’re trying to deal with a situation that seems horrific and trying to control
everything we can and bring this to resolution as quickly as possible,”
university spokesman Roger Williams said.

Kimpel Hall houses faculty in a number of departments – communication,
drama, English, foreign languages and journalism, Williams said.

Journalism department chairwoman Patsy Watkins many of the 50- to
60-student classrooms on the floor would have been filled at the time.

Students left the building in an orderly fashion, saying they had been told to
leave, Watkins said. “All we’ve been told is that shots have been fired,” she
said.

Kimpel Hall is shaped like a T, with classrooms along the long end of the T
and offices across the crossbar.

The 15,000-student campus is in the northwest part of the state. Both
President Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton taught law there in the
mid-1970s.