A student who admitted to police he’d fantasized for years about stabbing people to death was charged Tuesday with carrying out a building-to-building attack at a Texas community college that wounded at least 14 people, many of whom were stabbed in the face and neck.
20-year-old Dylan Quick used a razor-type knife to try and kill as many people as he could, an event he’d been planning at the suburban Houston campus for some time. According to authorities, pieces of the blade were found in at least one victim and broken blade pieces also were found in the area where the stabbing occurred on the Lone Star Community College campus in Cypress, and the handle was discovered in a backpack that Quick was carrying when he was arrested.
Quick was charged Tuesday night with three counts of aggravated assault.
Students described the bloody scene which started around 11:20a:
Diante Cotton, 20, said he was sitting in a cafeteria with some friends when a girl clutching her neck walked in, yelling: “He’s stabbing people! He’s stabbing people!”
Cotton said he could not see the girl’s injuries, but when he and his friends went outside, they saw a half-dozen people with injuries to their faces and necks being loaded into ambulances and medical helicopters.
Michelle Alvarez told the Houston Chronicle that she saw the attacker running toward other students and tried to back away. She said she didn’t even feel it as he swiped at her.
“He came running and swinging at my neck, as I tried to get out of the way,” she said.
Harris County Sherriff Adrian Garcia said that when emergency calls came into the department, there were indications that “students or faculty were actively responding to work to subdue this individual.”
“So we’re proud of those folks, but we’re glad no one else is injured any more severely than they are,” Garcia said.
Media and police swarmed the quiet neighborhood about 10 miles from the campus after the attack. Some neighbors described him as quiet, and noted that he didn’t appear to have many friends, staying indoors most of the time unless his parents were outside working in the yard.
Michael Lincoln, who lives next door to the Quick family, described the suspect as friendly.
“If he’s outside, he speaks to me, `Hey neighbor, how you doing?'” Lincoln said.
He added that Quick had never been aggressive, which makes the accusations against him shocking.
“He stayed inside most of the time unless they were doing yard work,” he said.
Elva Garcia, 46, who lives two houses down from the Quicks, described him as a nice young man who stayed out of trouble and only came outside with his parents. She saw him, she said, just this past weekend, working with his parents in the front yard.
“We can’t even believe it. What motive would he have?” Garcia said.
The attack came three months after a different Lone Star campus was the site of a shooting in which two people were hurt. The suspected gunman in that incident is charged with aggravated assault.
Story courtesy of Huffingtonpost and AP News
