Leondra Head | Local & World Editor
Ohio State University student, Abdul Razak Ali Artan was shot dead by police after driving through a crowd of students and then stabbing multiple people with a butcher’s knife on the university’s campus.
According to ABC News, Sophomore Jacob Bowers, 20, had been sitting on a bench listening to music before class when he saw a man pull “a large knife” and start “chasing people around trying to attack them.” Bowers went on to say, “Luckily there were so many people he couldn’t focus on one target.”
Eleven people were taken to hospitals after the incident, but none of the injuries were life-threatening. The incident was initially reported as an “active shooter.”
The university identified the officer who took down Artan as Alan Harujko, who has been on the force for two years.
According to a press conference by officials, the incident was first reported at 9:52am Monday morning when the suspect struck pedestrians with a car. When the active shooter warning was sent out, some students barricaded themselves in classrooms.
Artan, an 18 year-old student at the university. Arten was a Somalian refugee who left Somalia with his family in 2007 and moved to Pakistan. He came to the US as a legal permanent resident of the United States, officials said.
Just three months ago, Artan was quoted in OSU’s college newspaper, The Lantern, as he discussed his troubles finding a place to pray on his new campus.
“I wanted to pray in the open, but I was kind of scared with everything going on in the media. I’m a Muslim, it’s not what the media portrays me to be,” he is quoted in the paper as saying. “If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen. But I don’t blame them. It’s the media that put that picture in their heads, so they’re just going to have it, and it — it’s going to make them feel uncomfortable.”
In The Lantern, Artan said he is a transfer from Columbus State, presumably Columbus State Community College. Online records from that school said he graduated from there in May with an associate of arts degree.
According to NBC News, Nicole Kreinbrink, a student who was walking down the street when she saw the car hit people who had evacuated an academic building during a fire alarm. Kreinbrink said, “This car just swerved and ran into a whole group of people. All these people were running and screaming and yelling.”
A campus lockdown was lifted about 11:30 a.m., some 90 minutes after the violence unfolded on the Columbus, Ohio, campus, where 60,000 students are enrolled. After 11:30am, all classes for that day were canceled.
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