Around 6:30 p.m. Thursday night, four gun shots rang out near Chadwick Place Apartments on East Lee Boulevard.
Thomas McBride, a senior accounting major at Mississippi State University and resident of Chadwick Place Apartments, heard the shots and saw the aftermath. 
“I was sitting in my room talking with my roommate, Taylor, and we hear essentially four pistol shots, and we both kind of stare at each other for a second, and we both kind of go ‘That was gunshots,’ and it sounded like it was right down the street, like very close, so we rushed and locked the doors, turned out all the lights,” McBride said. 
McBride said they heard yelling and shouting and looked out the window. 
“We look down and there was a figure hunched over, on our block on our parking area three cars down from mine or so, relatively close. There’s a guy hunched over on the ground. It was fairly dark outside, so we couldn’t really see but he was obviously hurt,” McBride said. 
A car, what looked to be a 1980s or 1990s brown Lincoln, then came down the street and pulled up at the scene. 
“They open up the (car) door and we hear some yelling and the only thing we could really hear was ‘No, you can’t leave them. We’ve got to pick ’em up,’ as another guy rushes out of the car, picks him up, takes him to the car and they drive off,” McBride said. 
MSU police believe a suspect then ran toward MSU’s campus on foot after the shooting. At 7:08 p.m. all MSU students received a Maroon Alert phone call notifying them of the incident and urging them to avoid the area.
Chief Communications Officer Sid Salter said it is typical for the university to issue a Maroon Alert when someone who is armed with a weapon or has committed a crime attempts to move onto campus.
Additionally, Salter said MSU officials try to assist MSU PD in any way possible during a potential threat.
“The university has K9 capabilities, and the K9 was used to try to track an individual. That assistance was completed, the second Maroon Alert went out, and we basically notified the campus community that, to the best of our knowledge, the danger had passed,” Salter said.
McBride mentioned there was a large blood puddle where the figure had been crouched down that was later hosed off by the fire department. 
Salter said two people who were not MSU students went to OCH Regional Medical Center after the incident. Their injuries were not life-threatening, and they are expected to be released from the hospital on Friday.
“No one from Mississippi State was injured to our knowledge,” Salter said.
McBride, who grew up in Jackson and formerly lived in Aspen Heights, said incidents like these were not out of the ordinary where he was from, so he did not feel scared. He also said did not feel unsafe during the incident and thought the police handled it well. 
“Taylor and I, honestly we weren’t that nervous, besides the four shots, that was the one point where we knew something was going down, but we never really felt unsafe … It looked like all the action happened in one second and they were just trying to get out of there,” McBride said. 
Since the shooting occurred off-campus at the apartment complex, the Oktibbeha County Sheriff’s Office took over the investigation once MSU PD believed the suspect was no longer a threat to campus.
McBride said the sheriff’s department had the area taped off and remained on scene until late in the evening.
Friday morning, the sheriff’s department said their investigators were all out of the office working on the case and that a press release would be issued. 
UPDATE: Friday afternoon, the Oktibbeha County Sheriff’s Office sent out a press release stating that an arrest has been made from the incident. Samuel Lee Kirkland, 20, of Louisville, MS was arrested on charges of armed robbery, aggravated assault and possession of controlled substance. The two gunshot victims were treated at OCH and released. The sheriff’s department is still searching for two other suspects they believe are juveniles as well as a “silver with heavy rust on top 1990 Oldsmobile 98 MS Tag number HLB 7359 believed to be driven by the juveniles.” 

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Hailey Storey | The Reflector

MSU Police Department and the Oktibbeha County Sheriff’s Office used K-9 units to assist with the search for last Thursday’s shooting suspect.