Colorado State University police shot and injured an armed man who officials said was “acting erratically” on the Fort Collins campus Monday evening.
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CSU police received a report about the man being near Newton Plaza on the main campus around 5:35 p.m., university officials said in a campus safety report. An officer arrived to find a man with a handgun who advanced toward the officer. “Gunfire occurred,” CSU officials wrote, and the officer shot the man, then immediately rendered first aid.
CSU officials said the wounded man was taken to an area hospital and no other injuries were reported. “This was not an active shooter incident,” CSU officials wrote.
A CSU student who said he witnessed the shooting while biking near the Center Avenue Mall told the Rocky Mountain Collegian newspaper that he believed the man fired first before the responding officer shot back.
“I was biking up to the center here, and I saw the cop walk up to the Microbiology Building,” Daniel Bradford told the CSU student newspaper. “There was a dude standing out there who was screaming his lungs out. While I was biking past the cop car, that the cop got out of, the cop approached him and told him to put the gun down and dude started screaming.”
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Bradford told the Collegian that he first heard a single shot that he believed came from the man who’d been screaming.
“I know it was the shooter because the cop hadn’t even pulled out his gun,” Bradford told the newspaper. “Then he pulled it out and shot the dude, like five or six times that I can remember.”
At 6 p.m., CSU leaders alerted the Fort Collins campus to avoid the area between the Chemistry and Microbiology buildings “due to police activity.” At 6:50 p.m., campus officials gave the all-clear without revealing what had happened, but said police activity would continue in the area.
The Eighth Judicial District Critical Incident Response Team has been activated to investigate the police shooting, CSU officials said. Fort Collins Police Services is the lead agency investigating the shooting.
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This is a developing story that may be updated.
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