October 27, 2019 – In Breaking News – Dallas News
The parking lot outside the Party Venue near Greenville was littered Sunday with signs of the panic of the night before.
Halloween masks people had cast away lay near blue medical gloves that dotted the ground.
Nearby, a pool of blood had soaked into the gravel.
But Sgt. Jeff Haines of the Hunt County Sheriff’s Office said even a brief glimpse inside the venue was worse.
“Horrific,” he said, describing what he’d seen while authorities searched where a gunman shot eight people at a crowded party as nearby Texas A&M University-Commerce celebrated homecoming weekend.
Two of the wounded died at the scene, including 23-year-old Kevin Berry Jr. of Dallas. Four more people were in critical condition late Sunday.
(About 750 people were at a Texas A&M Commerce homecoming party when authorities say the shooter entered through the back door and began to fire. Courtesy of ABC News and YouTube. Posted on Oct 27, 2019.)
He described the eerie scene of the debris left behind — a lost hat, a shoe lying outside the door — as the frightened crowd of about 750 fled.
Some were so frantic they cut themselves on broken glass scrambling to escape through windows.
Graphic video posted online immediately after the shooting showed terribly injured victims as people screamed in the background.
“It’s horrific to think about what was going through the minds of the people there,” Haines said.
The chaos that began about midnight Saturday was reflected in the uncertainty of the next day as officials’ accounting of the number of people who’d been shot wavered.
Initial accounts had suggested the gunman was armed with a semiautomatic rifle, but Hunt County Sheriff Randy Meeks confirmed the weapon was a handgun.
And authorities said they still hadn’t identified a suspect, despite the hundreds of potential witnesses around him when he began firing at the venue along U.S. Highway 380.
(Gunfire erupted at a large unsanctioned Texas A&M University-Commerce homecoming event near Greenville. Courtesy of ABC News and YouTube. Posted on Oct 27, 2019.)
Saturday night’s party, attended mostly by people in their teens and early 20s, had been promoted as a homecoming event but wasn’t university-sanctioned.
Texas A&M-Commerce confirmed that four of its students had been treated and released from hospitals.
The first person the gunman shot may have been his intended target and the rest of the victims may have been fired upon randomly, the sheriff said.
“The amount of people that were there, the overcrowdedness of it — it gave the opportunity for this shooter to be able to accomplish whatever he wanted to accomplish,” Meeks said.
“When you have this many people in one place, it’s an easy target for somebody.”
(Hunt County Sheriff Randy Meeks gives the latest information on the Greenville shooting during a press conference on Sunday morning in Greenville, Texas. (Video ) Courtesy of the Dallas Morning News by Ryan Michalesko, and YouTube. Posted on Oct 27. 2019.)
Continue reading… 2 die as gunman shoots 8 people at party near Greenville, authorities say
Anyone with information about the shooting may call the Hunt County Sheriff’s Office at 903-453-6800 or Crime Stoppers at 903-457-2929.
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