(Reuters) – Two men were shot and killed at Grambling State University in Louisiana, and police searched on Wednesday for the assailant who fled the scene, school and law enforcement officials said.

A student, Earl Andrews, 23, and Monquiarious Caldwell, 23, who was not enrolled at the university, were fatally shot during an altercation in a campus courtyard shortly after midnight Wednesday, the officials said.

The shooting came after an argument in a dormitory room, said Major Chad Alexander of the Lincoln Parish Sheriff’s Department, the agency investigating the incident.

Grambling spokesman Will Sutton said in an email, “Our prayers go out to the victims and their families. Violence has no place on our campus.”

Classes were scheduled on Wednesday, Sutton said.

“It is homecoming week, a normally joyful time,” he said. “We would never have anticipated anything like this. It’s such senseless violence.”

Both of the shooting victims were from Farmerville, Louisiana, Sutton said.

Grambling State University is a historically black college attended by about 4,800 students in Grambling in northern Louisiana.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee and Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Jeffrey Benkoe)