11 PM. PRESS CONFERENCE
So we are very saddened to report that there has been an incident on the campus of Michigan State University. There has been shots fired and a shooting in multiple locations near campus. Please understand that the information that we're sharing right now is preliminary. Our priority right now is the safety of our students and our campus. The information that we're sharing may change but we are gonna be as transparent as we can and share as much information as we can, but that information may change as it's preliminary.
This incident started this evening around 8:18 pm. at Berkey Hall on campus. We received multiple 911 calls of a shooting inside Berkey Hall. Numerous officers responded, we were quickly on scene within minutes and there we did locate several victims of a shooting. The incident did move to a building in close proximity, the Michigan State University Union building, where there was another report of a shooting immediately following the first incident. Police and emergency responders acted quickly. We tended to the victims at both of those scenes and there was a overwhelming law enforcement response to campus to help with this situation.
I can confirm that there were at least five victims. All five victims were transported to the hospital, some of those victims do have life threatening injuries. The suspect in this incident, and we believe there to be one suspect was last seen leaving the MSU Union on foot on the north side of that building. We are just receiving surveillance footage of that suspect that we will be releasing shortly. Initial information is that the suspect is a black male, shorter in statue, wearing red shoes, a jean jacket and a ball cap and we will follow up with additional descriptors of that suspect. Community members on and off campus should remain sheltered in place. We immediately launched our emergency notification system and advised the entire MSU campus to shelter in place, as this suspect is still outstanding.
For people on campus - please do not come to campus. I can't say that enough. For parents, we understand, I can only imagine the emotion that's involved right now, it's going to help us and it's going to help our response and it's going to help us identify the shooter the less people that are on campus at this point. Please do not come to campus. We are doing everything we can to ensure the safety of our campus and all of our students.
We currently have hundreds of police officers and law enforcement officials, state local and federal on campus working in a coordinated effort to ensure the safety of campus and identify and apprehend the suspect. All campus activities will be cancelled for the next 48 hours, including sporting events, classes and all campus related activities.
Please follow our Twitter page for updates, we are sharing live updates at that location. I can't stress this enough, you're probably hearing a lot of information and misinformation right now from social media, the scanner - calls that we're receiving that are not accurate. We strongly encourage you to follow the accurate information source and we will continue to provide as many updates and accurate updates as we can. There has been false reports. False reports of additional shootings. There has been false reports of the suspect seen in numerous different locations. Those reports are not accurate. Please follow us for accurate information.
As I said, we're very early on in this investigation, it remains ongoing and we are going to continue to meet back here and provide updates, on the hour. We wanted to provide as much accurate information as possible, right now, and we will continue to do that moving forward. As I said, information is very preliminary at this point and we are working very hard to gather that information to accurately get it out to our community, to students, their parents and to everybody who needs that information. Please note that the safety and security of this campus and our students is our absolute priority at this point.
We will meet back here at midnight for an additional update. We will push out some information including a photograph of the suspect that we just obtained, immediately following this briefing. Thank you and we'll see you back here in an hour.