(CNN) — The suspect in the shooting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte identified himself as the gunman when officers stormed a classroom after he opened fire, court documents show. Authorities identified the suspect as former student Trystan Terrell, 22. He opened fire with a pistol in a classroom with dozens of students on April 30, killing two people and wounding four others. Terrell was taken into custody after identifying himself and a Glock firearm was recovered at the scene, court documents said. Officers said that at the time of his arrest, he had a black leather bag on him with multiple gun magazines. Search warrants filed in Mecklenburg County Court said officers seized a laptop, paper targets, three handgun magazines, six boxes of ammunition and a magazine holder from Terrell’s apartment. He apparently targeted the Kennedy building, which he was familiar with, police said. “The choice of that building was by design. It was intentional,” Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney said, declining to elaborate. He had ‘quite a bit’ of ammunition The university said Riley Howell, 21, of Waynesville, North Carolina, and Reed Parlier, 19, of Midland, North Carolina, were killed. Howell charged the gunman and knocked him off his feet, helping lead to his capture. Authorities have not provided information on a motive for the shooting. The suspect legally purchased the handgun he used in the shooting, and had “quite a bit” of ammunition with him, Putney said. He was taken into custody without incident, and as police led him away in handcuffs, he tilted his head back and smiled at the cameras. Terrell was indicted on two counts of murder and four counts of attempted murder in Mecklenburg County, according to court papers. The grand jury also indicted him on four counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, and one count each of possession of a firearm on educational property, and discharging a firearm on educational property. He is being held without bail. He apparently targeted one table Sophomore Joshua Ayers, 20, was in the classroom when the shooter burst in. The liberal studies class has about 100 students, but only about 30 were in class that day for final presentations. “All of a sudden, the door on the north side of the room slams open. A guy rushes in, pulls up a gun with his right hand … and began firing at the far north corner table,” Ayers said. “He didn’t speak a word – just ran in and started shooting. He said the attacker appeared to target one particular table. “I don’t want to say he specifically fired at that table, but fired mostly in/around that area,” he said. Ayers said he calmly walked out of the class after the shooting. “I know it sounds kind of weird, but … I didn’t panic, didn’t get scared. I just got up and left the room,” he said. I didn’t think “school shooting” until I talked to police. Shooting survivor will graduate this weekend Emily Houpt was one of four students injured in the shooting. She will be the first to walk across the stage in Saturday afternoon’s commencement ceremony at UNCC. Howell and Parlier, who were killed in the shooting, will receive degrees in memoriam. Houpt will be at one of three ceremonies with her family. The ceremonies will be livestreamed, and will be held Friday at 5 p.m., Saturday at 10 a.m. and Saturday at 4 p.m. CNN’s Pamela Kirkland and Jamiel Lynch contributed to this report<doc-sep>(CNN) — They lost their lives under painfully similar circumstances. When a classmate opened fire Tuesday at STEM School Highlands Ranch in suburban Denver, 18-year-old Kendrick Castillo charged him, getting shot but giving others time to take cover or run. Eight others were wounded. A week earlier, another gunman opened fire in a University of North Carolina at Charlotte classroom, sending people diving for cover or rushing toward a door. Riley Howell, a 21-year-old student, tackled the shooter. Howell was one of two people killed, but he managed to knock the gunman off his feet and bring the shooting to an end. “It’s … heroic but we still needed him here,” Lauren Westmoreland, Riley’s girlfriend of more than five years, told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on Friday. “There never should have been a scenario in which they had to lay down their lives, especially not ones so young who still had their whole life to live.” In the age of “run, hide, fight” – what experts describe as the new mantra for surviving an active shooter situation by taking out the gunman – the heroism of these students came at too high a price. “I’m sitting here thinking that maybe what Riley did is what people are going to have to start doing,” Westmoreland said. “I don’t like to think about the fact that someone else had to do the same thing.” She added, “I don’t ever want to have anyone else deal with what I did when I walked out of my last exam. It was supposed to be a happy moment, and I had to look at all these texts, phone calls, asking me if Riley was OK, if I had heard from him. There was a shooting at Charlotte. Have you heard from him? And I’m sure it was the same thing for Kendrick Castillo’s parents that day.” The newly founded Riley Howell Foundation will assist organizations that support victims of gun violence, according to Westmoreland and her brother, Matthew. “So now. only a week later, there is another family that needs help and not every family gets the media attention, and eventually that does die down when all the cameras go away and the news has left town (and) they are just left with silence in their house, and we want to be there for them when that happens,” he said. The Westmorelands said they were not surprised to learn that Howell charged the gunman, knocking him off his feet and averting more bloodshed. That allowed a police officer to rush in, disarm the suspect and take him into custody. “It was something that I was trying not to think about until I knew for sure,” Lauren Westmoreland said. “It was a lot of sitting there waiting, wondering, hoping that he wasn’t scared or anything like that when it happened. It’s just like as soon as his parents told me that’s what happened, I was like, of course, that’s what happened.” Said Matthew Westmoreland, “I was trying not to think about that. I didn’t want that to be the case. I knew if he was in the same room, I knew what he would do.”<doc-sep>This image was removed due to legal reasons. On April 30, a campus shooter killed two UNC-Charlotte students, Riley Howell and Ellis Parlier. In the two weeks since, hardly anyone on Capitol Hill has so much as uttered their names. Advertisement On Monday, Brian Murphy, a D.C.-based reporter for McClatchy, published a report from the nation’s capitol, highlighting the lack of a response to the UNC-Charlotte shooting from national politicians. While state legislators in the Tar Heel State sent out their obligatory “thoughts and prayers” statements, the tragedy hardly registered on D.C.’s radar. As of Monday, the shooting still has yet to be addressed by President Donald Trump, in person or online (he did make plenty of time last week to screw over Indian Country, however). Likewise, as reported by Media Matters, the major cable networks granted the shooting just 45 minutes of total coverage. The sole attention granted to the shooting has come by way of the state’s representatives in D.C., and even then, it’s been sparse. On Thursday, seven of North Carolina’s representatives in the House held a moment of silence for them on the House floor. Sen. Richard Burr published a single Tweet the day of the shooting. Sen. Thom Tillis, who lives roughly 15 minutes from UNC-Charlotte’s campus, read a brief statement on the Senate floor, in which he read a paragraph about the two dead students, highlighting Howell’s decision to charge the shooter. The focus on what has been widely deemed a heroic action played into Murphy’s larger critique of the media’s coverage of the shooting, as most of the national news coverage focused on Howell tackling the shooter, as they did days later when Kendrick Castillo rushed a shooter at his Colorado high school. In the time since, both Howell’s long-time girlfriend and school safety experts have lamented the idea that students are now forced to train themselves to be martyrs or risk higher body counts. Even a person that attended the UNC-Charlotte graduation commencement address told Splinter that while speakers honored Howell’s heroism, they didn’t discuss lingering concerns present among parent and students about how, if at all, the school could prevent future shootings. What’s so frustrating about the entire situation, as a North Carolinian and a younger person that’s become already desensitized to the nature of the mass shooting news cycle, is how familiar it all feels. The idea that the Charlotte shooting would ever register as more a faint blip on Congress’ radar was always far-fetched for the simple reason that the tragedy was not quite tragic enough in relation to what we’ve all watched play out on social media or the nightly news. That is, as the issues of gun violence and deteriorating mental health of college campus atmospheres have spiraled and gone ignored by the people that hold power, the necessary body count or shock level required to make people look up from their desk has shot upwards into the dozens. The end result is that the lives of two, or four, or six college students is now little more than the price of living in America.<doc-sep>
The gunman who launched a deadly attack at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte last week appeared to target a specific group in a classroom, but his reasons remain elusive. An affidavit accompanying a search warrant of Trystan Andrew Terrell’s apartment and interviews conducted by The Associated Press reveal the assailant zeroed in on the students sitting at a table in the anthropology and philosophy of science class. Witness Joshua Ayers made that statement to police in the affidavit and reiterated it to the AP on Thursday, saying Terrell headed toward a table that wasn’t the closest one to the door through which he entered the room. “He came in and directly walked to the table in the corner,” said Ayers, a sophomore who was sitting at a different table. “He didn’t move from that area of the room.’’ According to Ayers, Terrell fired five or six shots aimed at the table, saying, “He didn’t look anywhere else.” Riley Howell, 21, who was commended for saving lives by tackling the attacker, and Ellis “Reed’’ Parlier, 19, were killed in the April 30 assault. Four other students were wounded. Terrell, 22, was indicted Monday on charges of murder and attempted murder, among other counts. Police have said from the beginning they believed Terrell had chosen the Kennedy building for his attack on purpose, but they have not revealed a motive. The class, taught by professor Adam Johnson, is held in a wide room in the Kennedy Hall and the students sit in groups at round tables. Johnson said in a blog post that Terrell was registered for the class and initially seemed engaged, but eventually dropped it in January. Sophomore Jared Jackowitz was sitting at the table in question and told the AP he and other students there also felt they were the subjects of the attack, but didn’t know why. “The kid wasn’t part of our group,’’ Jackowitz said. “I didn’t know him at all.” Jackowitz said three students at the table were shot and another one barely escaped injury when a laptop in his backpack stopped a bullet that would have otherwise hit him. Prevention best option:Police stopped UNC Charlotte shooting quickly. But what about preventing it? Heroic death:'Let's tell Riley we love him': Hundreds gather to honor UNC Charlotte shooting victim “We felt like our table was the one targeted because we had more shots toward us,” Jackowitz said. “I don’t know if the guy was aiming for all of us.” The investigative documents made public Thursday revealed Terrell had a bag with multiple ammunition magazines, and that six boxes of ammunition were seized from his apartment. There is considerable mystery surrounding Terrell, who grew up in the Dallas area and moved to North Carolina with his father after his mother died when Terrell was 15. He completed high school and attended Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte before enrolling at UNCC. Authorities said he withdrew from the school before the semester was over. His grandfather, Paul Rold, has told new outlets Terrell is autistic and did not socialize much with his peers but had previously shown no affinity for firearms. “Never in a million years would you have thought he could do this,’’ Rold told the Charlotte Observer three days after the shooting. “It’s still up in the air what motivated him.” Contributing: The Associated Press