A 23-year-old Santa Clara man who was a student at California State University, Sacramento is dead after his roommate beat him -- possibly with a baseball bat -- in their dorm room after a fight, according to authorities. Police then shot the alleged attacker after he came at them with a knife.
Campus officers went to the dorm just after 2 p.m. after reports of a disturbance and found the man bloodied and unconscious on the floor and another man who charged them with a knife, campus police chief Dan David said.
Sacramento coroner's deputies on Thursday identified the beating victim as Scott Gregory Hawkins.
Hawkins had a form of autism known as Asperger syndrome, his father, Gerald Hawkins, told the Sacramento Bee. The condition sometimes made him a "target for bullies," he said.
Gerald Hawkins, a math teacher, said his son also wanted to be a teacher. He loved history and chose Sac State because of of the school's history program.
"He liked to talk on and on about his favorite subjects, especially history," his father said. "And he knew an amazing array of facts about Roman armies and World War I and World War II.
Hawkins went to high school at Mountain View Academy, a Christian college prep school, and attended West Valley College before heading off to Sac State.
Officers at first fired a pepperball gun at the agitated student, who has been identified as Quran Jones, after he refused to drop the knife. That didn't stop Jones, so at least one officer shot him. Students in the area reported hearing between four to six shots.
Two other students in the building went downstairs after they heard loud noises coming from the first floor. They saw a man swinging what they described as an aluminum bat, "breaking everything in his room," 19-year-old Tsegay Arefaine told the paper.
"He was going nuts," Arefaine said. "He was breaking the windows, the furniture; he was even hitting himself in the head with his own bat."
Police made Arefaine and the other student move so they went into a study area, where they could see through a window right into Jones' room. They watched as he pushed a table against the door, barricading himself inside. Then they heard the shots.
"It's all pretty crazy." Arefaine said.
Both students were taken to hospitals, where Hawkins was pronounced dead.
The two, who were roommates in a five-person suite, had no known conflicts, friends say.
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They were both nice kids," Dustin Stumpf, who lived with Jones and Hawkins, told the paper. "I don't know what happened. I was always nice to them and they were nice to me."
The dorm area was locked down for a short time after the incident but students were allowed back into the area after school officials determined that it was an isolated event.
Jones was arrested and will face homicide charges for the beating death and an attempted murder charge of a police officer.
