University student Neal Oa, 22, is recovering with his family three days after one of his roommates, Dayvon Maurice Green, shot him in the leg before turning the gun on himself, friends and family said.
In what police describe as a murder-suicide, Green, a 23-year-old graduate student, shot and killed another roommate, 22-year-old undergraduate student Stephen Alex Rane, before shooting Oa and then killing himself, police said.
Prince George’s County Police declined to release the identity of the surviving victim of Tuesday’s shooting, but spokeswoman Nicole Hubbard said the student was released from the hospital Wednesday and was “resting comfortably with his family” at home.
Oa is recovering at his family’s home in Frederick County, and his stepfather, Chris Merz, said although his son still has a bullet in his leg, he hopes to return to the city as soon as possible, according to WUSA9.
“As bad as we feel, we can’t imagine how the other families are feeling, Stephen’s parents,” Merz told the local network station. “It just kind of makes us sick to our stomachs when we think of that. We get pretty choked up with the what-ifs. … It’s a miracle that he survived it.”
The phone number linked to Merz’s residence has been disconnected.
Oa suffered the injury as he was running to safety toward a neighbor’s house in the 8700 block of 36th Avenue, WJLA reported. Hiding in the bathroom, he called an ambulance and then his family.
“He saw the gun coming out of the kid’s pocket and just had a sense that something wasn’t right as he turned to run,” Merz said. “That’s when he got hit. He felt his leg, and something was there and just decided, ‘I gotta go. I gotta run.’”
Merz told WJLA that Oa and his other roommates in his off-campus home knew Green owned a gun. Green legally purchased the 9 mm semiautomatic handgun he used in the crime.
Green was a diagnosed schizophrenic, according to multiple news reports, but Oa and his roommates did not know, Merz told WJLA. In the wake of this crime, the University Health Center is trying to expedite funding increases to go toward helping students address mental and emotional health at the university. Other groups on the campus — the student-run Help Center and the Counseling Center, which offers free counseling services to students, faculty and staff — are also working to accommodate more appointments and encourage members of the university community to reach out to friends in need.
“I know they were a little uncomfortable. There were things,” Merz told WJLA. “He was a little different, but then you’re in a school of 38,000 kids. You’re going to meet kids that are different than you.”
Oa is a network support technician at BIS Global — a technology technical solutions company based in Rockville. CEO Philip Schmitz, a 2002 university alumnus, said Oa had worked there for four years, adding Oa attended Montgomery College four years ago, then began working full-time for BIS and became a full-time student again at this university in 2012.
“We’re not a big company, so the thought of one of our own employees being involved in something like that was pretty shocking to me and the whole staff,” he said. “None of us could believe that happened.”
Schmitz and several other employees have reached out to Oa, he said.
“Neal is a great, great kid. He’s very reliable and very dedicated,” Schmitz said. “I didn’t know him outside of work, other than maybe a few happy hours after he turned 21, but he is a great employee, and I can’t say anything bad about him.”
Merz told The Baltimore Sun that his stepson is distraught, but his condition is improving.
“He’s a strong, smart boy, so we’re confident he’ll come through that OK,” Merz said. “But it’s a scary moment to be literally running for your life. … And thank God he did.”
