The parking lot outside the Party Venue near Greenville was littered Sunday with signs of the panic of the night before. Halloween masks people had cast away lay near blue medical gloves that dotted the ground. Nearby, a pool of blood had soaked into the gravel.
Sgt. Jeff Haines of the Hunt County Sheriff’s Office said even a brief glimpse inside the venue was worse.
“Horrific,” he said, describing what he’d seen while authorities searched where a gunman shot eight people at a crowded party as nearby Texas A&M University-Commerce celebrated homecoming weekend. Two of the victims died, and four more were in critical condition late Sunday.
Hunt County authorities on Monday identified the two victims who were fatally shot. One was 23-year-old Kevin Berry Jr. of Dallas and Byron Craven, also 23, of Arlington, authorities said.
He described the eerie scene of the debris left behind — a lost hat, a shoe lying outside the door — as the frightened crowd of about 750 fled. Some were so frantic they cut themselves on broken glass scrambling to escape through windows.
Graphic video posted online immediately after the shooting showed terribly injured victims as people screamed in the background.
“It’s horrific to think about what was going through the minds of the people there,” Haines said.
The chaos that began about midnight Saturday was reflected in the uncertainty of the next day as officials’ accounting of the number of people who’d been shot wavered.
Initial accounts had suggested the gunman was armed with a semiautomatic rifle, but Hunt County Sheriff Randy Meeks confirmed the weapon was a handgun.
And authorities said they still hadn’t identified a suspect, despite the hundreds of potential witnesses around him when he began firing at the venue along U.S. Highway 380.
Saturday night’s party, attended mostly by people in their teens and early 20s, had been promoted as a homecoming event but wasn’t university-sanctioned.
Texas A&M-Commerce confirmed that four of its students had been treated and released from hospitals.
The first person the gunman shot may have been his intended target and the rest of the victims may have been fired upon randomly, the sheriff said.
“The amount of people that were there, the overcrowdedness of it — it gave the opportunity for this shooter to be able to accomplish whatever he wanted to accomplish,” Meeks said. “When you have this many people in one place, it’s an easy target for somebody.”
The shooting took place about 15 miles southwest of the Commerce campus, which is about 65 miles from Dallas.
A “Twerk or Treat” costume party had been promoted for Saturday night at the venue, which is described as an 8,000-square-foot facility with a capacity of 500 — well below the estimated attendance at the event.
Hunt County deputies who were investigating complaints about illegal parking at the venue arrived about 20 minutes before the gunman opened fire.