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COMMERCE, Texas — Shilo Hutton’s emotions are roiling. She’s a student at a college in the spotlight for a rarity: two deadly shootings, one on campus and another off, in the span of three months.
“Our school really wasn’t this before,” says Hutton, a junior at Texas A&M University-Commerce, where a gunman this week killed two sisters and injured a 2-year-old toddler in a campus shooting.
The news late Tuesday night of an arrest in the case, and a police statement saying that the latest shooting is “a targeted, isolated event,” gave some relief to students at this university in East Texas. But students say the repeat violence is unsettling.
capital murder charge:Man arrested in fatal shooting of two women in Texas campus dormitory
Freshman Jonathan Garcia is trying to make sense of it. “I’m safer at college because I know some people that are my friends, but I’m scared, too,” Garcia said outside of the campus’ student center.
Few students were milling about on campus Tuesday because the university canceled all classes and events through Wednesday as the investigation forged ahead into the shooting. Unease, worry and even fear were circulating beneath the placid surface of the well-kept college, cropping up throughout social media.
It’s not the first time bullets have hit home here. Just over three months ago, a gunman opened fire at a homecoming party in nearby Greenville at a non-university event.
Two were killed and six were injured in the mass shooting. The gunfire triggered chaos in the crowd of hundreds of panicked party-goers.
Cafeteria worker Exavier Davis, 33, stopped on his way to the college gym Tuesday afternoon to ponder the violence in Greenville.
“I think they got whoever they wanted to get, and everybody else was just collateral damage,” Davis said.
He said the campus is in shock from Monday’s shooting at one of the college residence halls.
“It does send little chills down your spine because you just don’t know what people are capable of,” he said. “Death is a part of life. It’s just hard to swallow sometimes.”
College campuses across the USA are reflective of rising mass shooting numbers. A database compiled by The Associated Press, USA TODAY and Northeastern University shows there were more mass killings in 2019 than any other year dating back to at least the 1970s.
In all, there were 41 mass killings last year, defined as when four or more people are killed, excluding the perpetrator. Of those, 33 were mass shootings. More than 210 people were killed.
Most of the mass killings barely became national news, failing to resonate among the general public because they didn’t spill into public places as massacres did in El Paso and Odessa, Texas; Dayton, Ohio; Virginia Beach, Virginia; and Jersey City, New Jersey.
Texas A&M University-Commerce police said 21-year-old Jacques Dshawn Smith is in custody and is believed to have fatally shot his ex-girlfriend, 20-year-old Abbaney Matts, along with her 19-year-old sister, freshman Deja Matts, and Deja’s 2-year-old son, inside the Pride Rock residence hall. Smith is facing a charge of capital murder.
That puts the Commerce shooting in line with what the USA TODAY study shows — namely, that the majority of the killings involved people who knew each other.
Officials said Deja Matts, of the Dallas suburb of Garland, was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in public health. Police said Smith is believed to be the ex-boyfriend of Abbaney Matts. Neither Abbaney Matts nor Smith were students at the school.
The wounded 2-year-old was Abbaney Matts’ son. The child has been released from the hospital and is being cared for by family, officials said.
Commerce students on Monday had only to look out of their dorm windows to see flashing lights from police vehicles at Pride Rock. Officers responded to a call at 10:17 a.m. about a shooting there.
After the grim discovery of the victims, the university issued a shelter in place advisory that lasted about 90 minutes.
The day after the shooting, Victoria Johnson was still grappling with what she said was “a horrible thing.”
“Why is there so much violence on our campus?” the junior said.
She heard from her parents after the gunfire. “My dad, he said if there was another incident or something, he thinks I should transfer,” Johnson said.
The campus at Commerce is picturesque, with trees dotting the grounds. It also features several buildings with large windows overlooking the over 2,000-acre campus. Typically, they would offer a grand view of the big sky. But Tuesday was gray and cloudy with bad weather on the way.
A statue of a lion, the school mascot, held sway outside the student center where outdoor tables and chairs sat empty in the chill.
The Commerce campus is about an hour’s drive from busy Dallas. The university is perched on the Texas Blackland Prairies in the small town of Commerce, population about 8,000.
The school’s around 8,000 undergraduate and 4,000 graduate students come mostly from the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and surrounding counties. The college is the second largest in the Texas A&M University System.
Greenville is about 20 minutes up the road toward Dallas. It’s a bigger small town of about 27,000.
Between the on-campus shooting Monday morning and late Tuesday afternoon, the campus teetered in a tense limbo. Behind the scenes, university police and several law enforcement agencies were pushing the investigation forward.
Feelings ran high in reaction to a Facebook update posted late Monday morning on the university’s page.
“Why won’t school officials say if they are searching for a shooter. The public should be told that information,” Steven Dial wrote.
The tension broke at 5 p.m. Tuesday when the arrest was announced.
Sophomore Dawson Knight said the latest shooting is very sad, but he still feels fairly safe on campus.
“We very seldom have anything that happens here, so it was bound to happen eventually,” Knight said.
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