“He had a smile on his face. He was having fun.”
By Raif Karerat
Officials have identified the student who stabbed four people on the campus of UC Merced as 18-year-old Faisal Mohammad from Santa Clara, Calif., the university confirmed to Fox News Thursday.
Mohammad was fatally shot by police during Wednesday’s attack, during which he assaulted fellow students with an 8 to 10 inch-long hunting knife.
Two of the injured were airlifted to nearby hospitals, while the other two were treated on campus. The incident began when the assailant used the knife to stab two people in a second-floor room around the start of an 8 a.m. class.
“He had a smile on his face, he was having fun,” a construction worker who helped stop the attack told CBS 47.
Byron Price, 31, was working on remodeling a waiting room when he heard a commotion and rushed to check on it. Price immediately dashed into the classroom to stop the attack, saying he’d initially thought it was a fight.
“I really believe he’s a hero here. I think he prevented this first student from dying,” Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke said. “The cops on campus, oh my gosh, praise them because they stopped a threat, but this first guy, he stopped a death.”
Warnke said Mohammad fled the room after Price and ran down two flights of stairs to the outside, where he stabbed a school employee sitting on a bench. He was subsequently shot and killed by pursuing campus police as he fled the scene.