Standoff at CWRU ends in 1 death

Many of the 70 people in the building were calling loved ones.
CLEVELAND (AP) -- A gunman in camouflage opened fire Friday inside the Case Western Reserve University business school, killing at least one person and wounding at least two others.
The standoff ended seven hours later, with police taking a suspect in custody.
"We believe he is the shooter or one of the shooters," said city Police Chief Edward Lohn. He would not elaborate.
Lohn said about 70 people had been in the Peter B. Lewis Building and that most had been rescued.
He would not discuss injuries, saying family members had not been notified.
Getting out
Earlier, students and faculty scrambled to get out of the building after seeing the gunman fire indiscriminately. An unknown number of people were trapped inside, too fearful to move. Many called loved ones to tell them they were hiding.
University Hospital spokeswoman Janice Guhl said a male who had died was taken to the hospital. She wouldn't release specifics of his injuries.
She said no others from the business school were taken to the hospital.
Comments
"We're all shaking and quite scared. One of the girls in our office is seven months pregnant -- we're trying to keep her as calm as possible," Tracy Warner, 30, told The Associated Press from a third-floor office where she was hiding with several other people.
Bonnie Copes, an administrative assistant, said she heard several gunshots beginning around 4 p.m. Copes, 50, was locked in a department office inside the building and unable to leave. She continued to hear gunshots.
"Rounds and rounds and rounds," she said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
About four hours later, rescuers began taking people out of the building, and they were being reunited with family members waiting at a nearby campus auditorium.
Appeals to gunman
Officers had appealed to the man to call a designated police phone number. By early evening, two dozen SWAT officers, holding shields and wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, moved inside.
Denise Smith, a spokeswoman at Huron Hospital, said a male was treated for a gunshot wound in the buttocks and was listed in good condition. Smith said a female was treated at the hospital and was in stable condition. She did not have details on her injuries, including whether she had been shot.
Witnesses said the gunman was firing with a machine gun. Police, moving reporters away from the building, said it was a high-powered rifle.
"He had a machine gun, book bag, camouflage shirt, military green hat, white pants and a book bag," LeKisha Spencer, 28, who works in a first-floor cafeteria. "I didn't see his face.
"He was just walking, aiming his guns and firing."
Few students
Dick Bennett, director of development for the Weatherhead School of Management, was locked in a third-floor room with eight other faculty members. He said few students were in the building because finals were completed last week.
Sachin Goel, 26, a master's student from India, said he was talking with two friends on the first floor outside the cafeteria when the gunman approached and shot one of his friends.
"My friend said he would give me a ride home, and then I heard him shouting. I heard gunshots," he said.
His friend screamed as he was shot. Goel and his other friend dove under a table, and the gunman fired at them.
"But he couldn't get us. And then he again shot at us, and we turned the table and put it in front of us," Goel said.
Albert DiFranco, 26, an assistant alumni director, said he was returning to his first-floor office from the bathroom when he saw drops of blood and broken glass on the floor outside his door.
Then people shouted down from a second-floor mezzanine for him to get out.
"I ran out," he said. "People were saying, 'Go go, go!' I got down to the ground."
William Day, a student at the Cleveland Institute of Music, was passing by and saw the gunman enter the building.
"I saw this man with camouflage enter the door ... and I was like, that's weird, and then all of a sudden people started running out of the building, and they were telling me that he just went in there and started just spraying the place with bullets," he said.
The building
The $62 million Peter B. Lewis Building opened in the fall and was designed by Frank Gehry, the internationally renowned architect who also created the titanium-covered Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Case Western is at University Circle, a parklike setting of cultural, medical and educational institutions on the eastern edge of downtown. There are 1,600 students in the business school and a total of 9,500 at Case.
Because of the shooting, the Cleveland Orchestra, which performs in nearby Severance Hall, postponed until Sunday its Friday performance featuring pianist Mitsuko Uchida.
The Lewis building is about five stories high. Instead of walls on the south side, it has a curving roof, made of 20,000 stainless-steel shingles, that seemingly tumbles to the ground.
Lewis, an art collector and the billionaire chairman of Progressive Insurance, gave Case $37 million toward construction of the building.