Man killed father in Wyoming bow-and-arrow attack

CASPER, Wyo. — Authorities say a man involved in an attack at a community college and at another location in central Wyoming that left three people dead, including himself, used a bow-and-arrow in one of the slayings and was the son of one of the victims.

Casper Police Chief Chris Walsh said Saturday that 25-year-old Christopher Krumm, of Vernon, Conn., first stabbed 42-year-old Heidi Arnold about two miles southwest of Casper College on Friday morning.

Krumm then went to the college and shot his father, 56-year-old computer science instructor James Krumm, in the head with the bow-and-arrow in front of a group of students before stabbing himself with a large knife.

Walsh says the younger Krumm smuggled the weapon into the classroom under a blanket.

The campus was locked down and class called off for the day. Later, after the lockdown, students who lived on campus trickled back to their dorm rooms.

The violence came as a shock to this typically peaceful prairie city of about 56,000 in east-central Wyoming.

"It was a little bit of a wake-up call," said freshman Nathan Hansen, of Glenrock, a town of 2,500 about 30 miles east of Casper. "It was kind of odd hearing news of that happening here."

Authorities said they didn't believe there was any further threat to the community.

All students and staff were evacuated from the classroom building where the attack occurred just before 9 a.m. MST.

The college sent out a campus-wide alert via text message and email within two minutes of receiving word of the attack at 9:06 a.m., school spokesman Rich Fujita said. The lockdown ended at about 11 a.m. after school officials received word that police were no longer searching for a suspect, Fujita said.

There are fewer classes on Fridays than any other day of the week at Casper College, so only between 1,500 and 2,000 of the college's 5,000 students were there, he added.

"It is particularly painful because of our size," Fujita said of the small, tight-knit campus.

Pearson Morgan, a freshman, was in a math class on the first floor of the science building when his instructor relayed the news in a state of shock.

"My teacher was just so sick, he said, 'You can just leave,'" Morgan said.

Morgan walked outside his classroom to find a female student crying. He then turned to see two or three officers with assault rifles bounding up the stairs. Then, all the classrooms emptied and a crush of students carried him outside, but nobody panicked, Morgan said.

"There was a large group of students behind me," he said. "There was a lot of confusion."

Political science instructor Chris Henrichsen said he was showing the film "Frost/Nixon" to his Wyoming and U.S. government class when he stepped into the hall and was told a homicide had occurred on campus.

Moments later his students started getting messages about the campus lockdown on their phones.

"We locked the door and waited for further instruction," Henrichsen said.

About two miles away, Dave Larsen said he was headed to the gym when he drove past a body in a gutter with two people standing over it, one talking on a cellphone.

Larsen lives about a block from the location of the body, a well-kept middle-class neighborhood of mostly single-story houses.

Walsh said that within minutes of the initial call, there was another report of a traumatic injury about two miles southwest of campus.

The college planned a candlelight vigil and memorial service on Tuesday.

Casper College opened in 1945 as the state's first junior college and moved to its current site 10 years later. Wyoming has only one four-year university, the University of Wyoming in Laramie, which serves more than 13,000 students.

Casper is Wyoming's second-largest city. Wyoming residents refer to it as the "Oil City" because it's a hub for the state's oil industry.

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Associated Press writers Ben Neary in Cheyenne, Matt Volz in Helena, Mont., and Dan Elliott in Denver contributed to this report.