Investigators believe recent shooting incidents at Paine College were the result of a drug deal gone bad, authorities said Wednesday.
And a $4,000 reward is being offered for information leading to arrests and convictions in connection with the shootings.
At a press conference in Augusta, Richmond County Sheriff Richard Roundtree said a witness associated with Xavier Deanthony Cooper, the alleged gunman in Monday’s campus shooting, told investigators Cooper purchased drugs from JuJuan Baker, the victim in the shooting. Cooper and Baker are students at Paine College. Cooper, a 20-year-old sophomore business major, is from DeKalb County.
“That transaction was a bad transaction … there is bad blood between he and the victim,” Roundtree said. “The suspect and that individual witness are associates.”
The sheriff said Baker, 21, of Wilmington, N.C., had previously been arrested on gun charges in another state.
Several students were removed from the school, college vice president Brandon Brown said, although he did not clarify if the students were expelled.
“It was determined that we had several students that did not need to be here,” Brown said. “So we took the appropriate course of action to have them transition to their homes.”
Roundtree said Baker is suspected of drug possession and that several of his associates “have been charged with narcotics possession in the past.”
Sunday afternoon, a student was injured when gunfire was reported on Paine’s campus. About 1 p.m. Monday, Baker was critically injured when he was shot in the head on campus.
That same day, deputies arrested Cooper and charged him with aggravated assault, possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime and possession of a firearm on school grounds.
Investigators said the two campus shootings were linked to two more off-campus gun-related incidents over the same two-day period. The spate of gunplay is the result of an ongoing dispute between apparent rival factions that included Cooper and Baker, Roundtree said.
“We don’t think this is a random act,” he said. “We think this is a targeted shooting based on an ongoing altercation. These two individuals were involved in an altercation. We know that they had ill will toward each other.”
Cooper's father told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution earlier this week he did not know his son had a gun. A graduate of Cedar Grove High near Lithonia, Cooper had been in fear for his life because of threats from locals who developed a beef with a group of Atlanta students, his dad said.
The sheriff acknowledged that Cooper had been attacked recently.
“There’d been an altercation a couple of months ago with the suspect where he was assaulted at an outside business,” Roundtree said. But, “we have not received information about the suspect’s ongoing threats.”
College and sheriff’s officials have been focused on restoring a sense of campus security in the hopes of encouraging more potential witnesses to come forward and give statements.
“A lot of people who were present have not come forward,” Roundtree said. “We need them, not just for this incident, but to help us prevent any future incidents.”
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