Police: Fla. college student plotted attack

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A col­lege stu­dent with two guns, hun­dreds of rounds of ammu­ni­tion and a back­pack filled with explo­sives pulled a dorm fire alarm Mon­day in an appar­ent attempt to force other stu­dents out into the open so that he could slaugh­ter them, author­i­ties said. But he instead put a bul­let in his head as police closed in.

James Oliver See­vaku­maran, 30, was found dead in his dorm room at the 51,000-student Orlando cam­pus of the Uni­ver­sity of Cen­tral Florida. No one else was hurt.

“His time­line got off,” uni­ver­sity Police Chief Richard Beary said. “We think the rapid response of law enforce­ment may have changed his abil­ity to think quickly on his feet.”

Some 500 stu­dents were evac­u­ated from the build­ing in the mid­dle of the night, unaware how nar­rowly they had escaped what could have been another Vir­ginia Tech-style bloodbath.

“It could have been a very bad day here for every­body. All things con­sid­ered, I think we were very blessed here,” Beary said. “Any­body armed with this type of weapon and ammu­ni­tion could have hurt a lot of peo­ple here, par­tic­u­larly in a crowded area as peo­ple were evacuating.”

Police shed no light on a motive, but uni­ver­sity spokesman Grant Hes­ton said that before the episode, the school was in the process of remov­ing See­vaku­maran from the dor­mi­tory because he hadn’t enrolled for the cur­rent semes­ter. He had never been seen by uni­ver­sity coun­selors and had no dis­ci­pli­nary prob­lems with other stu­dents, Hes­ton said.

Detec­tives found notes and other writ­ings that indi­cated See­vaku­maran had care­fully planned an attack and “laid out a time­line of where he was going to be and what he was going to do,” Beary said.

The episode began early Mon­day, just after mid­night, when See­vaku­maran pulled a gun on one of his room­mates, who holed up in a bath­room and called police, Beary said. Around the same time, See­vaku­maran pulled a fire alarm, appar­ently to get other stu­dents out in the open, the police chief said.

In his room, inves­ti­ga­tors found four makeshift explo­sive devices in a back­pack, a .45-caliber hand­gun, a .22-caliber tac­ti­cal rifle, and a cou­ple of hun­dred rounds of ammu­ni­tion, police said. Beary said it appears his weapon and ammu­ni­tion pur­chases began in February.

Anto­nio White­head, 21, said he heard the fire alarm go off in the dorm and thought it was a rou­tine event.

Posted by Becky Brooks on Mar 19 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.