Student shot at UC Berkeley has died, university says

BERKELEY, Calif (Reuters) - A University of California, Berkeley student who was shot in a campus computer lab not far from the scene of anti-Wall Street protests has died of his injuries, the university said on Wednesday.

Christopher Nathen Elliot Travis, 32, died late on Tuesday afternoon at Highland General Hospital in Oakland, hours after the shooting at the Haas School of Business, university spokesman Dan Mogulof said.

University police said there is no indication that the incident was related to a day of rallies at Berkeley linked to anti-Wall Street protests.

"There is no information at this point in the investigation suggesting that this is anything other than an isolated incident," Mogulof said.

Mogulof said Travis was an undergraduate transfer student who started classes at Berkeley in the fall and that family members had been told of his death. He said he did not know where Travis had transferred from.

"This is one of the most difficult times we have had as a community," Chancellor Robert Birgeneau told 200 students, faculty and staff who gathered at the business school on Wednesday, according to a statement posted on the university's web site.

"Our heart goes out to the family of this young man," Birgeneau said, according to the statement.

'DROP YOUR GUN'

University police chief Mitchell Celaya told reporters on Tuesday that officers responding to a call of a man with a gun in the lab shot the suspect when he pulled the weapon from his backpack and displayed it in a threatening manner.

Lyle Nevels, chief information officer for the Haas School of Business, has told Reuters that the incident began when a staff member told him he had seen a young man pull a gun from his backpack in an elevator.

Nevels said he went to look for the man and saw him speaking to people in the computer lab.

Nevels called police and said responding officers confronted the man in the lab. He said he heard three or four gun shots after they told him to drop his weapon.

"I heard a scuffle, I saw the police say 'Drop your gun', and then I heard shots," Nevels said.

The university said in its written statement that Travis pointed his gun at police, who had ordered him several times to drop the weapon and had made sure that witnesses and bystanders were not in the line of fire.

Police had interviewed 17 witnesses and were continuing their investigation, the university said.

Thousands of people converged on the UC Berkeley campus on Tuesday in demonstrations called in response to the arrest of 39 people last week after anti-Wall Street protesters sought to set up an "Occupy Cal Encampment" there.

By Wednesday morning protesters had set up 16 tents and a cardboard shack in a central plaza on campus, despite warnings by police that doing so was in violation of university policy and state law.

University spokesperson Claire Holmes said the school had not enforced its ban on overnight camping partly because campus police were focused on the shooting.

(Additional reporting by Dan Whitcomb and Jim Christie; Writing by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Greg McCune)