Police Conduct Manhunt For Suspect In University Of Virginia Shooting

(Reuters) - Police cordoned off the University of Virginia campus and surrounding campuses on Monday in search of an "armed and dangerous" suspect wanted in a shooting that left three dead and two wounded.

University police have identified student Christopher Darnell Jones as a suspect in the shooting that took place around 10:30 p.m. local time at the Charlottesville, Virginia, school involving 25,000 students on Sunday.

Police officers from multiple agencies conducted a search in and around the sprawling campus Monday for the suspect, University of Virginia Police said in a series of tweets, urging students and staff to stay until further notice.

School president Jim Ryan said in an email shared on social media that the shooting "broke his heart," adding that classes were canceled for the day.

"This is a message every leader hopes they never have to send, and I am devastated that this violence has befallen the University of Virginia," he wrote.

Jones was wearing a "burgundy jacket, blue jeans and red shoes" and may have been driving a black pickup truck, authorities said.

Police have not released details of the shooting and have not identified the victims.

Jones, who Ryan says is a student at the school, was called up to the school's soccer team in 2018.

The shooting is the latest in a wave of gun violence on American college and high school campuses in recent years. The bloodshed has fueled a debate over tighter restrictions on access to guns in the United States, where the Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms.

In 2007, a shooting at Virginia Tech, 150 miles southwest of Charlottesville, killed 33 people, including the shooter, and injured 23 others in one of the deadliest mass college shootings in US history. .

(Reporting by Jyoti Narayan in Bengaluru and Brendan O'Brien in Chicago, editing by Toby Chopra and Chizu Nomiyama)

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