Police respond to reports of an active shooter on the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, Ohio on November 28, 2016.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins / AP
At least 11 people were injured in an attack at the Ohio State University Monday morning.
Shortly before 10 a.m. local time, a suspect drove a vehicle into pedestrians, and then emerged from the car and started attacking them with a butcher knife. He was shot and killed by police. Eleven people sustained stab wounds, and at least one person is in critical condition.
Officials have identified the suspect as Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a student at the university. The police officer who shot him is 28-year-old Alan Horujko.
The university initially reported there was an active shooter on campus, according to a tweet by school officials. Students were advised to shelter in place or “Run Hide Fight.” The lockdown was lifted about two hours later.
Classes were canceled for the rest of the day. Aerial footage broadcast on cable news showed multiple police cars and ambulance on campus. Many students had recently returned to campus after Thanksgiving break.
We’re live-blogging the news below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
Police Identify Suspect in Attack, Officer Who Shot Him
Authorities identified the suspect in the attack Monday as Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a student at Ohio State University. No additional details about the suspect or his motive were given. Authorities also identified the officer who shot and killed Artan as 28-year-old Alan Horujko, who has served with the university’s police department since January 2015.
"We all owe a debt of gratitude," Monica Moll, the university's department of public safety director, said of Horujko during a news conference Monday. "He did a fabulous job today."
The Violent Attack at OSU, From a Student's Perspective
Though many Ohio State students first heard the reports of an attack through the university’s campus alert system, some students who were already on campus were close enough to see the events unfold.
Michael Cloonan, a second-year student, said he was in class when he heard gunshots.
“We were going over an example problem and we heard four gunshots,” Cloonan told The Lantern, the university’s student newspaper. “People at the window saw [a] man laying on the ground. We went upstairs to lab upstairs and locked the door. Police responded very quickly. Immediately. Twenty seconds. Maybe less. Really quick.”
Martin Schneider, a student, told the BBC he heard a car engine revving.
“I thought it was an accident initially until I saw the guy come out with a knife,” Schneider said of the vehicle’s driver.
Nicholas Flores, a third-year student, said he was in class when he heard the reports of an active shooter on campus. While the rest of his classmates went to the fourth floor of the building to barricade themselves, he went to the courtyard to help.
“Most of these people here are kids on campus,” Flores, a 27-year-old former marine, toldThe Columbus Dispatch. “Their parents send them here to be safe and be educated. It's sad.”
OSU Police Chief Says Suspect Used Butcher Knife in Attack
Students leave buildings surrounding Ohio State University’s Watts Hall, where police were called to respond to reports of a shooting on campus. (John Minchillo / AP)
Ohio State Police Chief Craig Stone said at a press conference Monday afternoon that the suspect in the attack used a butcher knife to attack pedestrians.
At about 9:52 a.m. local time, the suspect drove a vehicle into pedestrians on campus. “He exited the vehicle and used a butcher knife to start cutting pedestrians,” Stone said. “Our officer was on scene in less than a minute and ended the situation in less than a minute.”
That officer, Craig said, shot and killed the suspect. The officer was not injured.
Michael Drake, Ohio State’s president, said he will visit the injured victims at hospitals later this afternoon.
“We prepare for situations like this and always hope never to have one,” Drake told reporters at the press conference.
The AP and local media report that nine people were transported to hospitals with stab wounds and gunshot wounds. Eight people have non-life-threatening injuries, and one is in critical condition, according to local hospitals.
Local media reports the attack began when a car drove into Watts Hall, located on the school’s North Campus. Two people emerged from the vehicle, one with a knife and the other with a gun, according to witnesses.
The Columbus Dispatchreports one suspect has been killed by police.
Police are continuing to search campus for potential suspects. Police have surrounded a parking garage at West Lane Avenue and Tuttle Park Place on campus.
Heavy police presence at the Lane Avenue Garage. Officer on scene said the remaining shooter is believed to be inside. pic.twitter.com/YN9m2mFYUV
Molly Clarke, a student in the university’s MBA program, told CNN over the phone that she and her classmates are locked inside one of the buildings on campus. “It’s slightly terrifying,” Clarke said. She said several of her classmates who previously served in the military are guarding the door of their classroom.
At least seven people have been taken to the hospital, CNN reports. WBNS-TV, a network in Columbus, Ohio, reports the number of injured is at least eight, citing local fire officials.
Staffers from The Lantern, the school’s student newspaper, are tweeting photos from the scene. They report that ambulances, SWAT vans, and a bomb squad is on campus.
Ambulances line Woodruff Avenue, street is blocked off between High and College pic.twitter.com/oQD7rhjP7y
Our son needs structure, but he also needs to unwind. What should we prioritize?
Editor’s Note: Every Tuesday, Abby Freireich and Brian Platzer take questions from readers about their kids’ education. Have one? Email them at homeroom@theatlantic.com.
Dear Abby and Brian,
Everything feels untenable. I am so frustrated for my son, whom I’ll refer to as “Caleb,” who is in first grade. I’m frustrated for his teachers too, and for me and my wife. Caleb is on the verge of tears by the time online school ends at 2:30, and, to be honest, so am I. His schedule is different every day, and he can’t read well enough to follow all the directions, so even though I am working and ignoring him most of the time, he interrupts me just often enough to make me seem unprofessional. After his day is done, we let him watch TV until my wife or I can stop working, which is around 5 o’clock most days. This means that one of us has about an hour with Caleb before bath, dinner, and bedtime.
Plenty of moms feel something less than unmitigated joy around their grown-up kids. Make sure yours feels that she’s getting as much out of her relationship with you as she gives.
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
Arthur C. Brooks will discuss the science of happiness live at 11 a.m. ET on May 20. Register for In Pursuit of Happiness here.
“You are … irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.” So wrote Johanna Schopenhauer in a 1807 letter to her 19-year-old son Arthur. “No one can tolerate being reproved by you, who also still show so many weaknesses yourself, least of all in your adverse manner, which in oracular tones, proclaims this is so and so, without ever supposing an objection. If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.”
The Tesla CEO’s SNL performance was neither redemptive nor entertaining. But it served a classic purpose: glossing over his real power.
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that elite parents, in possession of excellent jobs, want to get their kids into college.
“It is a truth universallyacknowledged,” Jane Austen begins Pride and Prejudice, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” In early-19th-century society—an aristocratic world of inherited wealth—marriage occupied center stage. A good spouse was an all-purpose resource: essential for moving up in the world, as for Austen’s heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, or for sustaining a dynasty, as for the object of her affections, Mr. Darcy.
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The question isn’t whether it can end well, but how exactly it will end badly.
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Now, more than six months after the election, the circus in Arizona, ordered by the state Senate, has become the last stand of the denialists. The review has attracted the close attention of Trump himself, who has fired off repeated, blustery statements about the count from his Mar-a-Lago exile. But Arizona is committing all the same sins that Trump’s supporters have been denouncing, using a brazenly partisan process run by apparently unqualified parties, with procedures kept secret and subject to change. Observers are being asked to sign nondisclosure agreements, reporters have been kicked out of the site, and the exercise is being largely funded by interested outside parties—even though the Arizona legislature recently passed a law that prevents local boards from accepting outside funding.
Ancient crustacean guts are miraculously preserved in a Waukesha quarry.
Some 440 million years ago, the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, suburb of Waukesha was unrecognizable. Where malls and breweries now stand was a shallow, tropical sea resembling a Bahamian cay. A hundred million years removed from the Cambrian explosion, when the diversity of life skyrocketed, this area teemed with alien creatures like spiny worms and armored trilobites. But look closer, and this primeval ocean takes on a familiar feel: Here, the some of the first scorpions scuttled alongside the earliest leeches. There were even conodonts—eel-like creatures sporting a shadow of a spine, making them some of our earliest relatives.
The amateur paleontologists Jerry Gunderson and Ron Meyer discovered these fossils at a Waukesha quarry in 1984. After splitting open rocks from a thin layer known as the Brandon Bridge Formation, they uncovered ultrarare fossilized soft tissue. Soft tissue, such as skin and organs, tends to be the first thing to decay after death. Knowing they had found something special, Gunderson and Meyer frantically shaved off slabs of the fossil-bearing rock, preventing them from being pulverized in the pursuit of limestone. They donated their find to the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum, where thousands of Waukesha specimens now fill drawer after drawer.
I surprised myself by enjoying this sad movie about old people working seasonal jobs.
Nomadland dares you to watch it. Even pressing the Play button on Hulu is a test of strength; do you have the stones to watch this plotless, dreary semi-documentary about elderly people forced to live in vans—and, yes, perform unspeakable bodily functions within them—and search for seasonal work? Or are you going to be a little baby and watch The Bourne Identity for the kabillionth time?
The much-reviled four-quadrant theory of moviemaking holds that a blockbuster appeals to all four sectors of the audience: young men, young women, somewhat older men, and somewhat older women. Nomadland is a movie that appeals to the four quadrants of the show-business apocalypse: menopausal women, people with life-threatening illnesses, people interested in poverty, and anyone with time on her hands who can’t find the remote.
Progressive communities have been home to some of the fiercest battles over COVID-19 policies, and some liberal policy makers have left scientific evidence behind.
Lurking among the jubilant Americans venturing back out to bars and planning their summer-wedding travel is a different group: liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic restrictions. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity—even when that means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit. In surveys, Democrats express more worry about the pandemic than Republicans do. People who describe themselves as “very liberal” are distinctly anxious. This spring, after the vaccine rollout had started, a third of very liberal people were “very concerned” about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, compared with a quarter of both liberals and moderates, according to a study conducted by the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington. And 43 percent of very liberal respondents believed that getting the coronavirus would have a “very bad” effect on their life, compared with a third of liberals and moderates.
How did a tiny, poor nation manage to suffer only one death from the coronavirus?
On January 7, a 34-year-old man who had been admitted to a hospital in Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu, with preexisting liver and kidney problems died of COVID-19. His was the country’s first death from the coronavirus. Not the first death that day, that week, or that month: the very first coronavirus death since the pandemic began.
How is this possible? Since the novel coronavirus was first identified more than a year ago, health systems in rich and poor countries have approached collapse, economies worldwide have been devastated, millions of lives have been lost. How has Bhutan—a tiny, poor nation best known for its guiding policy of Gross National Happiness, which balances economic development with environmental conservation and cultural values—managed such a feat? And what can we in the United States, which has so tragically mismanaged the crisis, learn from its success?
A raging outbreak in Brazil threatens gains against the virus.
As populism has experienced a resurgence in recent years, many have focused on the hazards the ideology poses to democratic systems. But today’s complex and highly technical global threats—pandemics, climate change, cyberattacks, financial crises—that demand technocratic solutions have driven home a grim reality: Populism can place us all at risk.
In 2018, a burst of anger over government corruption propelled a populist politician named Jair Bolsonaro to Brazil’s presidency. Brazil, which is currently suffering from one of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreaks, is a prime example of how populist governance in one country can threaten the whole world. If the way out of the pandemic is through science, in the form of mass vaccination and other containment measures, the corollary is also true: The way we remain mired in it is, in large part, through the kind of anti-science worldview that populists frequently champion.
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