Columbus Police continue sifting through evidence from Monday's car and knife attack on the OSU campus that hospitalized 11 people.
Police say student Abdul Razak Ali Artan rammed several people outside Watts Hall before getting out and slashing people with a butcher knife just before 10 am Monday.
Artan was a Somali refugee with permanent legal status in the U.S. He recently transferred to OSU from Columbus State Community College.
Speaking to WOSU on Tuesday, Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs talked about a Facebook post that NBC News reports Artan made just before the attack.
“Certainly that will be looked at and gone over...poured over to determine whether or not there was a basis there for his actions.”
In that post, the Muslim Artan reportedly called himself “a lone wolf” and mentioned a radical Islamic cleric.
Jacobs also said a building fire alarm that went off just before the attack was both a fortunate and unfortunate coincidence. It was bad, she says, in that it put more people on the sidewalk in harm’s way.
It might have also saved lives because the officer who shot Artan was responding to the alarm.
"It put the OSU officer close to the scene," Jacobs says.
The officer shot and killed Artan about a minute after the attack started.
Jacobs says police have not heard about any attacks or abuse against Muslims in retaliation to the Monday incident. She says police encourage people to report any such incidents.
