The Latest: 2 victims stabbed inside classroom, 2 outdoors

Merced County Sheriff-Coroner Vern Warnke said the contractor rushed into a classroom where he thought he heard fighting and intervened as one male student was stabbing another.

Merced County's sheriff says the UC Merced student suspected of stabbing four people before he was shot and killed by police has been tentatively identified but that his name is not being released because authorities have not been able to reach his family.

Campus Police Chief Albert Vasquez says the attack started inside a classroom and that more victims were wounded as the armed suspect fled.

Vasquez says two campus police officers saw the suspect outside and shot him as he turned toward them.

The chancellor of the University of California, Merced says the stabbings of four people by a student are a troubling act of violence that has left the rural campus shaken.

Leland says that despite the mass shootings on college campuses that have prompted schools to create emergency plans like the one activated at UC Merced after the stabbings, having an attack hit so close to home was shocking.

Campus officials also said the rural campus would be closed Thursday and urged the community to seek counseling services that were available.

Campus officials said the attacker was a male student and was shot and killed by police.

Officials say an attacker who stabbed five people at the University of California, Merced, before being shot and killed by police was a male student.

Phil Coba, a student government representative, says he has been told by numerous students that the stabbings started inside a classroom and continued outside before campus police shot and killed the attacker.

Coba says dining halls are providing free food to students and staff members who were on campus during the attack.

University of California, Merced, student Alex Lopez says there was an eerie, unsettled atmosphere on campus in the immediate aftermath of a stabbing that left five people injured.

Authorities say a suspect stabbed five people on a university campus in central California before police shot and killed him.