About 15 minutes later, the neighbor said she heard eight or 10 gunshots.
“I was sitting there, frozen,” said the neighbor, who said she thought about calling the police but decided not to. “It was a shock. You’d think it was a Saturday night brawl, but it didn’t seem to be ordinary circumstances.”
Other residents of Athens Street, who also wanted to remain anonymous to protect their identities, said that despite this incident, the area is usually safe.
“I think it’s a fluke,” one Athens Street resident said, adding that knowing the suspect is still at large was unsettling. “It’s very disconcerting to have him wandering around here.”
Back at Harvard, dozens of students had witnessed or heard the gunshots of the Athens Street shooting.
Daniel S. Anderson ’06 was walking down the concrete path toward Dunster and Mather when he heard eight gunshots behind him.
“People scattered and started running, toward DeWolfe Street and towards me,” he said. “Other people also thought they were gunshots. I called HUPD and they were there in literally under one minute.”
Anderson said he saw at least two Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) cars, an unmarked police car, CPD cars and a police truck arrive on the scene moments later. An ambulance also arrived.
Junior roommates Kate B. Yearwood and Mo C. McCaffery of Quincy House, were two of the many students within earshot of the incident who fled once the gun was fired.
They were walking past Leverett Towers when the incident occurred.
“We heard yelling and then the shots,” Yearwood wrote in an e-mail, “and we started running.”
Thirty minutes before the Athens Street shooting, a CPD officer patrolling the area about 10 blocks east of campus heard several unrelated gunshots, Pasquarello said. The officer then investigated the intersection of Howard and Callender Streets, found no victims and observed a speeding car leaving the scene.
The officer pulled the car over, talked to the occupants and performed a search of the vehicle.
“The officer recovered two loaded firearms and arrested two individuals for illegal possession of firearms,” said Pasquarello, who did not have access yesterday to the names of the two people arrested.
—Staff writer Hana R. Alberts can be reached at alberts@fas.harvard.edu.