A shooting at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia has claimed the life of a young person with deep roots in the South Carolina Lowcountry, drawing grief to a region already familiar with the pain of gun violence.

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger identified the victim who died following Thursday morning’s shooting on the ODU campus. One person was killed and two others were injured when a gunman opened fire on individuals at the university, according to officials.

Details about the victim’s Lowcountry connections were not immediately available in full from state officials, but family members in the Charleston area confirmed the ties. The shooting sent shockwaves through a campus community and, separately, through coastal South Carolina communities where the victim’s family has roots.

The incident unfolded Thursday morning at Old Dominion University, a public research institution with roughly 24,000 students in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. Campus officials and law enforcement responded to the scene, and the university issued emergency alerts to students and staff. The two individuals who survived the shooting sustained injuries, though their conditions were not immediately detailed in official statements.

Governor Spanberger addressed the shooting publicly, offering condolences to the victim’s family and calling attention to the ongoing threat of gun violence on college campuses. Virginia has seen repeated episodes of campus gun violence in recent years, including the 2022 shooting at the University of Virginia that killed three football players.

For communities along the South Carolina coast, news of the shooting carried a personal weight. The Lowcountry, which broadly encompasses the Charleston metro area, Beaufort County and surrounding coastal communities, has sent thousands of students to universities across the mid-Atlantic and Southeast over the years. When violence strikes those campuses, the reverberations reach back home.

Campus shootings have forced university administrators, state legislators and federal policymakers into recurring debates about how to protect students. The question of what more can be done rarely produces consensus, and the legislative response tends to vary sharply by state. Virginia lawmakers have faced that reckoning before. South Carolina’s own statehouse debates around firearms and campus safety have likewise produced limited movement on stricter measures.

For the family members in the Lowcountry now grieving, those policy debates are a distant abstraction. They are focused on the immediate reality of loss, the kind of loss that arrives without warning on an otherwise ordinary Thursday morning.

Old Dominion University officials did not immediately release a detailed timeline of the shooting or information about the suspect. Law enforcement authorities in Norfolk were leading the investigation as of Thursday afternoon. No information about a motive had been confirmed publicly.

The university, founded in 1930 and known for its programs in engineering, business and the sciences, serves a student body that draws heavily from Virginia but also pulls students from across the South, including South Carolina. For students currently enrolled there, the shooting raised immediate concerns about campus safety protocols and emergency response.

Gun violence on American college campuses has become a grim recurring story. According to tracking by gun violence research organizations, campus shootings have increased in frequency over the past decade. Each incident renews calls for action from students, parents and advocacy groups, while legislative responses at both the state and federal levels continue to fall short of what many advocates demand.

The victim’s identity, confirmed by the governor, is known to family in the Lowcountry. The Charleston Sentinel is working to gather more information about the victim and will update this report as details become available. The newspaper is also seeking comment from South Carolina public officials who may have known the victim or who represent the Lowcountry communities now mourning this loss.

Anyone with information relevant to this story is encouraged to contact the Charleston Sentinel newsroom. The paper is committed to covering the full impact of this tragedy on local families and to holding relevant officials accountable as the investigation proceeds.