University of Virginia: Mourning for campus shooting victims

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — The University of Virginia community mourned on Tuesday as new details emerged both about the three football players killed in a campus shooting this week and the criminal charges the suspect, a former player, faces.

“It feels like it’s a nightmare, to be honest with you. And I’m ready for somebody to pinch me and wake me up and say that this didn’t happen,” university head football coach Tony Elliott said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon.

University officials and police have said a student, Christopher Darnell Jones Jr., 22, joined a group of about two dozen others on a field trip Sunday from the Charlottesville campus to see a play in the nation's capital, about 120 miles (195 kilometers) away. As their bus returned to campus, Jones opened fire, killing the three players and wounding two others, one of them also a football player, according to authorities.

Ryan Lynch, a 19-year-old sophomore student on the trip, told Philadelphia TV station KYW the suspect pulled out a gun as they arrived back and pushed one of the now-deceased football players, stating: “You guys are always messing with me.”

“They just kept coming, more and more gunshots — just wouldn’t stop,” Lynch said of the shooting, adding the gunman then “just sort of walked or skipped off the bus.”

The shooting set off panic and a 12-hour campus lockdown amid a manhunt before Jones was captured Monday outside Richmond, the state capital.

University President Jim Ryan said Monday authorities did not have a “full understanding” of the motive or circumstances of the shooting. At Tuesday's news conference with Elliott, Athletic Director Carla Williams said she couldn't address anything related to the ongoing criminal investigation. Authorities have also not discussed the...