Shots fired at UT Austin *UPDATED*

A loan gunman fired several shots from an AK-47 at The University of Texas at Austin Tuesday morning before committing suicide on the sixth floor of Perry-Casteneda Library, officials said.

Police officials identified the gunman as 19-year-old Colton Tooley, UT Austin sophomore.

Law enforcement said several descriptions of the gunman were reported, but dismissed the rumors of another suspect, after conducting a secondary search.

Matt loving, UT Austin student, said he took cover in the graduate school dining area because most other places had windows.

“It was a weird place to be. We didn’t really know what was going on because they cut our cable on campus, but we knew it wasn’t good,” Loving said. “Some people were terrified, some were annoyed, and some just wanted to get off campus. I’ve never seen the campus so still.”

This incident is not the first shooting to take place on the UT Austin campus. In 1966, Charles Whitman, former student and Marine, killed 16 people and wounded 32 others, making it the second deadliest university shooting in U.S. history.

The deadliest university shooting was the Virgina Tech massacre in 2007, where Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people.

The third deadliest university shooting happened in 1976 at California State University. Edward Charles Allaway killed seven people and wounded two others in the library basement.

The fourth deadliest university shooting took place in 2008 at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb Illinois.

“You go to college and you’re like, OK, that is considered to be a safe zone…” Jordan Hanke, former NIU student, said. “That’s a real shock, you know, when something you think is safe is not safe.”

Six people were killed and 18 were wounded in the NIU shooting.

“We sat there, you know, when the Virgina Tech thing happened and thought, ‘well, that’s never going to happen here,’” he said. “These people were shot, and they’re dragging them out… and you see kids with cell phones taking pictures of them. That was probably the saddest thing.”

Robert Dahlstrom, UT Austin police chief, said at a press conference that they sent out text messages to students, faculty and staff to warn them of the incident.

The UT Austin alert system includes the emergency siren, loudspeaker system on campus, emergency text messages and online communication, according to the UT Austin Web site.

Alex Hatoum, UT Austin philosophy major, said the emergency alert system notified him of the incident.

“The main thing that I remember was the sudden shock and then everyone just contacting each other and making sure everything was OK,” Hatoum said. “To be honest, Facebook helped us feel more at ease since we all got on to see if everyone else was on.”

The University of Texas at Tyler has a similar emergency alert system called PatriotALERT.

“This is exactly a situation, had it occurred on our campus, that the emergency alert system (PatriotALERT) would have been activated,” Beverley Golden, UT Tyler news and information director, said.

According to the UT Tyler Web site, PatriotALERT can send e-mail, voice and text messages to the campus community within minutes.

All students have the opportunity to use PatriotALERT by entering contact information, specifically phone numbers, under the “Personal Information” section of myUTTyler. For more information about PatriotALERT, go to http://www.uttyler.edu/emergency/patriotalert/.

Once a student has been alerted of an emergency situation, they should follow University security protocol, which can be found at http://www.uttyler.edu/emergency/flipchart0808.pdf.

“Also, students, staff, and faculty will be emailed a link to the annual security report on Friday, October 1, 2010 which will contain information concerning emergency evacuation/sheltering and emergency notification,” Golden said.