A former Tennessee State University student who was shot on the Nashville campus Tuesday morning is listed in critical condition.
The 19-year-old victim, Larry Bates, was shot in a parking lot outside of Boyd Hall just after 9:30 a.m., reports WSMV. He was shot in the chest and transported to Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Bates had previously been enrolled at the university in spring 2017. It is still unclear why the Chicago native was back on the Tennessee campus.
The Metro Nashville Police Department says Bates was speaking with someone on the passenger side of a parked car in the dorm parking lot when he was shot. It is still unclear how many passengers were in the vehicle. The driver fled the scene before police arrived.
“We think it was that conversation that led to gunfire, which would translate that these people probably knew each other to some extent,” says Metro police spokesman Don Aaron.
A description of the shooter or other potential passengers have not been released as police review surveillance video and gather witness accounts.
Campus police say a Tiger Alert was sent to students but the campus was not put on lockdown, according to Local Memphis. Classes continued as scheduled on Tuesday.
North Precinct Commander Terrance Graves says his officers focus on the area where the shooting occurred “quite a bit”.
TSU had hired off-duty Metro police officers to patrol the campus by foot following a fatal 2015 campus shooting, reports the Tennessean.
Around 11 p.m. on October 22, 2015, TSU student Cameron Selmon was killed and three female freshmen were injured in a shooting outside the university’s Floyd-Payne Campus Center. Chris Gatewood and Robert Tunstall were arrested 10 months later and charged with murder.
Investigators say the shooting occurred following a disagreement over a dice game. Gatewood and Tunstall were not students at TSU.
