Twelve people left Florida A&M University’s homecoming weekend in ambulances rather than celebration, a reminder that no HBCU campus, however storied its traditions, is insulated from the gun violence that has become a recurring feature of American crowd life.
Key Points
- A shooting on Perry Street near Manatee Street, adjacent to Bragg Memorial Stadium, injured 12 people Saturday night, October 24, 2026, shortly after FAMU’s homecoming football game.
- Tallahassee Police Chief Lawrence Revell confirmed 11 victims suffered gunshot wounds; a twelfth person, a grandmother, was injured while fleeing the scene.
- Victims included six adults and six juveniles, the youngest just 11 years old; three sustained serious injuries, one critical.
- Police describe the preliminary cause as a fight or altercation among two or three individuals that preceded the gunfire; no arrests had been made and no suspects publicly identified.
- FAMU issued an immediate shelter-in-place alert and maintained that its campus itself remained safe throughout the response.
What Happened on Perry Street
Just before 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 24, 2026, gunfire erupted at the intersection of Perry and Manatee streets, a public corridor adjacent to Florida A&M University’s Bragg Memorial Stadium, where fans were still dispersing from the Rattlers’ homecoming matchup against Arkansas-Pine Bluff. Tallahassee police, who already had more than two dozen officers stationed in the area for the weekend’s festivities, responded within moments. The Tallahassee Police Department’s first public statement was spare and deliberately cautious: a shooting was under investigation, and “the number of victims and extent of injuries are unknown”. That caution would not last the night, as officers encountered a chaotic scene of fleeing crowds and multiple wounded people scattered across several blocks.
FAMU moved in parallel with police, posting a campus alert directing anyone near Bragg Stadium and Perry Street to avoid the area or shelter in place. The university later issued a public statement affirming that its campus itself remained secure and that “the safety and security of our students, faculty, and staff remain our highest priority,” even as the shooting unfolded on the public streets bordering its property rather than inside a university-controlled venue.
The Official Count and the Injured
By the time Chief Lawrence Revell addressed reporters, the picture had sharpened considerably. Twelve people were injured in total: 11 had been struck by gunfire, while a twelfth, described as a grandmother, was hurt while escaping the scene rather than by a bullet. The gunshot victims split evenly between six adults and six juveniles, the youngest just 11 years old. Three victims sustained serious injuries, one of them critical; the remaining eight were listed in stable condition. That distinction — 11 shot versus 12 injured overall — matters for anyone trying to classify the event against national shooting databases, which typically count gunshot victims specifically rather than everyone hurt in the surrounding panic.
Revell confirmed at least one victim was a FAMU student, though the enrollment status of the juveniles involved, some of whom may have been local high school students, remained unresolved in his public remarks. Officers who arrived first on scene carried wounded victims through the crowd to ambulances and used all-terrain vehicles to speed transport to hospitals, a response the chief credited with limiting the severity of outcomes given the volume of casualties arriving at once.
What Police Know About the Cause
Revell’s preliminary account framed the shooting as “an isolated incident between two or three individuals” that began as a fight and escalated into gunfire. Investigators believe a single shooter was likely responsible, though the department stopped short of confirming that figure and emphasized the investigation remained active. No arrests had been made and no suspects or persons of interest had been publicly named in the days immediately following the shooting, leaving the precise sequence — who fought, over what, and who produced a weapon — still under review by the department’s violent crimes unit and forensic teams processing shell casings and surveillance footage at the scene.
That investigative gap is ordinary, not suspicious. Shooting investigations involving crowded, chaotic scenes with dozens of witnesses and competing accounts routinely take days or weeks to produce charging documents, and Revell’s own briefings consistently declined to speculate beyond what evidence supported. The department asked anyone with information to contact Crime Stoppers or its tip line directly rather than circulate secondhand accounts.
Homecoming, FAMU, and the Weight of Place
Florida A&M’s homecoming is routinely billed as among the largest in the country, drawing alumni, current students, and extended families back to Tallahassee for a week of parades, concerts, and tailgating culminating in the football game. That scale is precisely why a shooting on its margins reverberates so widely: the incident occurred on public streets outside the stadium gates, not inside a university-controlled event, yet press coverage and public attention inevitably attached the shooting to FAMU itself. The distinction between a campus shooting and a shooting that happens to occur near a campus during a high-traffic weekend is not pedantic — it shapes how institutions respond, how security budgets get allocated the following year, and how the public remembers the event.
A shooting near Bragg Memorial Stadium in Tallahassee left 12 people injured, including six children, during Florida A&M University’s homecoming weekend, authorities said.
Police reported that 11 victims suffered gunshot wounds and described the incident as an isolated… pic.twitter.com/QpFKleYwQm
— One America News (@OANN) October 25, 2026
Where This Fits in a Troubling National Pattern
Homecoming-weekend gun violence on college campuses is not an isolated phenomenon. Everytown Research’s database of campus shootings found that nearly half of all October campus shootings — 46 percent — occurred during a school’s homecoming week, regardless of whether the violence happened at an official school-sponsored event. The crowding, late-night street gatherings, and alcohol-fueled socializing that define homecoming weekends create conditions conducive to the kind of fast-escalating personal dispute that police described here. Tuskegee University’s 2024 homecoming shooting, which killed one student and wounded 16 others, remains the starkest recent comparison, underscoring that this pattern cuts across HBCU and predominantly white institutions alike whenever large, loosely controlled crowds gather outside stadium perimeters.
Researchers who study how shootings are classified note there is no single agreed definition of a “mass shooting” — some databases count only fatalities, others count anyone struck by gunfire regardless of outcome, and the commonly cited Gun Violence Archive threshold is four or more people shot in a single incident. By that standard, the FAMU shooting qualifies unambiguously. Whether it is remembered as a campus tragedy or a street shooting adjacent to a campus event will depend less on the final victim tally than on how the surrounding investigation resolves the question of intent and motive — the one piece of this story still genuinely in progress.
Sources:
nypost.com, news18.com, tallahassee.com, wrdw.com, dnyuz.com, nij.ojp.gov
