Professor shot dead in campus shooting in Mississippi

A male professor has been shot and killed​ in a shooting at a university campus in the US state of Mississippi and the college remained locked down as police searched for a possible active shooter.

Students and staff at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi have been advised to take shelter and stay away from windows.

The lockdown began on Monday morning at 10:45 am local time. The Bolivar County coroner said the victim was a professor at the university.

Cleveland city police, the Bolivar County Sheriff’s Department and the Mississippi state police are searching for the shooter, who remains at-large.

“Fortunately for us, our public safety officers and university officials have trained many of us for active shooter situations,” Don Allan Mitchell, an English professor, wrote in a Facebook message to The Associated Press. “Many students are locked-down in classrooms, and professors and staff members are telling them the protocol. Plus, we are all texting and Facebooking each other to make sure we are safe.”

However, another English professor, Bill Hays, said the university did a poor job of communicating with faculty, staff and students about the emergency situation.

“It’s really frustrating because there is no campus-wide updating from a central command center. Everything we’re getting is just rumors,” Hays said in a phone call from his office in Keithley Hall, across the street from the shooting site.

Delta State University is a publicly funded school near the Mississippi-Arkansas state border with about 4,000 students.

Cleveland is a city in Bolivar County, Mississippi. The city’s population is just over 12,000 people.

Murder rates have increased in cities across the United States this year with over 30 cities reporting a rise in violence from a year ago, a recent report by The New York Times says.