The authorities in Baltimore on Wednesday said they had not located any suspects or made any arrests after five people, including four students, were shot and injured on the Morgan State University campus on Tuesday night.
The university’s president, David Kwabena Wilson, said that he had canceled classes for the week. For the first time in school history, he said, all homecoming week events “will be either canceled or postponed until the perpetrator(s) of this atrocity have been found and brought to justice,” Mr. Wilson wrote in a statement on Wednesday.
The shooting followed a dispute between two groups, the police said, and prompted an hourslong shelter-in-place order and the cancellation of classes on Wednesday.
One woman and four men, ages 18 to 22, were being treated for gunshot wounds that weren’t life-threatening, Richard Worley, the city’s police commissioner, said at a news conference early Wednesday. One among the injured had been released from the hospital, he said at a later news conference.
The shooting, Mr. Worley said, appeared to have followed a dispute and involved several armed people. The five victims, he said, were unintended targets.
The police were still investigating to determine how many people had fired, he added.
“One individual was a target of two individuals who had weapons,” Mr. Worley said. “We don’t believe that individual was hit.”
A third person, he said, “pulled a weapon,” but it was unclear if that person had fired any shots.
Before Wednesday, Morgan State’s homecoming events had never been canceled or postponed, Mr. Wilson said.
The shooting happened shortly after an annual ritual to crown Mister and Miss Morgan State before the football game on Saturday. At historically Black colleges and universities, homecoming is an important tradition that brings together generations of students and alumni.
Police officers who were on patrol heard gunshots at about 9:25 p.m. as students made their way from the packed auditorium in Murphy Fine Arts Center to a coronation ball at the University Student Center. The university asked people to stay clear of the area surrounding the arts center and Thurgood Marshall Hall, a nearby dormitory building where the police warned there was an active shooter.
Minutes later, the officers found the victims and noticed that windows had been shattered, leading them to believe that there was an active shooter, Mr. Worley said. The Baltimore Police Department soon issued a shelter-in-place order, which was lifted early Wednesday.
“We didn’t open the campus up until our SWAT team had cleared the building where the suspect may have ran, or where we thought the shot came from,” he said, adding that the police believed the shooting had taken place outdoors.
Tuesday night was at least the third time in consecutive years that a shooting had disrupted homecoming week at Morgan State. A man was shot last October at an “unsanctioned” homecoming after party. Two years ago, a student was shot at the conclusion of an otherwise peaceful homecoming week.
Federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said they were assisting with the response to the shooting. Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland said that his office was aware of the situation.
“The repetition of these horrific events is about one thing: easy access to guns,” Bill Ferguson, a Democratic state legislator who represents Baltimore, said on social media. “I cannot even fathom the feelings of parents who are fearing the safety of their children at Morgan tonight.”
Morgan State University is one of Maryland’s oldest historically Black colleges, with about 9,000 enrolled students.
The situation at Morgan State on Tuesday night was the latest example of an armed person threatening a college campus. In August, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was charged with killing a faculty member.
Later that month, a white gunman drove onto the Jacksonville, Fla., campus of Edward Waters University, a historically Black college, where he put on a bulletproof vest and drove away minutes later before killing three Black people in a nearby Dollar General store.
In February, a gunman killed three students and injured five others on the campus of Michigan State University.
Christine Hauser contributed reporting.
