UCLA 'Murder-suicide' Killed 2, Lockdown Lifted

A shooting that led to the death of two males on the UCLA campus has been confirmed to be a "murder-suicide," said LAPD Chief Charlie Beck.

"The important thing for people to take away from this is the campus is now safe," he noted at a news conference shortly after noon.

The UCLA campus was on a lockdown just after 10 a.m. after the Los Angeles university shooting on Wednesday, according to the university. Helicopter news footage disclosed that the students were filing out of school buildings in a row, with their hands held above their heads.

Both victims are male, UCLA Police Chief Jim Herren said.

Students on the campus were asked to take shelter in an engineering building. With the LAPD putting the entire city on tactical alert, it moved hundreds of officers to the campus as well as nearby areas.

The Daily Bruin, the school's student newspaper, explained that the man who shot the students wore a black jacket and black pants.

The university said in a statement posted online that police reported finding the two victims in Boelter Hall, a UCLA engineering building.

Not understanding the total number of victims or their conditions, LAPD Capt. Andy Neiman said it was not clear whether the university mentioned the campus cops or LAPD while reporting that the two were killed.

"The whole campus just started running, and I started running too," Mehwish Khan, a 21-year-old student who hid in the library with some other students, told the Los Angeles Times. "Everyone was very confused. We got in a building, and no one knew what was going on."

About 30 students had locked their classroom with belts, said Rafi Sands, a 20-year-old student and vice president of the student government. Due to a number of conflicting reports of the shooting through text messages and social media, the seriousness of the situation was not completely clear.

"We get a lot of Bruin Alerts for small things," he said. "It took a while for everyone to realize this is serious."

It turned out to be tough, ensuring a lockdown in a huge university.

"If you want to search [a] four-bedroom house carefully enough to ensure, as if somebody's life depends on it, that nobody is in that house, it's going to take eight or nine SWAT officers an hour to do that," Steve Moore, a former FBI special agent, told LA TV station KTLA. "Now imagine a 10-story, 15-story building - whether they're classrooms or dorms - imagine also that you have to check every crawlspace, every overhead in the buildings."