Sacramento State police have made the first arrest in the shooting that sent students running inside a first-year residence hall last Sunday night, announcing that 18-year-old Jermeer Hicks has been taken into custody in connection with the gunfire inside Klamath Hall. The arrest, confirmed in a Sacramento State Police Department email released at 9:10 p.m. on Friday, November 13, is the first named breakthrough in a case that has kept the campus on edge for a week, with five of the six people police say fled the building still being sought.

Source: The State Hornet

FOX40 reported the same development, saying Sacramento State police had arrested one of the suspects in connection with the Sunday night shooting at the Sacramento State campus, according to school officials. KCRA 3 also reported that one of the six people accused in the shooting inside the Sacramento State residence hall has been arrested, according to police. Hicks is an accused suspect in an active investigation and has not been convicted of any offence in the case; the reports announcing the arrest did not list the specific charges he faces.

The night of November 8 inside Klamath Hall

The shooting happened at approximately 11 p.m. on Sunday, November 8, inside Klamath Hall, a residence hall for first-year students in the university's North Village area. Sacramento State police said the gunshots were confirmed to have been fired in the first-floor lobby and in the computer room of the hall. Officers arrived on the scene one minute after the call was made, according to the department's email to the campus.

Six suspects were seen fleeing on foot towards J Street immediately after the shots. Police described all six as between 18 and 20 years old, with three of them in possession of handguns. No injuries were reported, and police said the suspects are not believed to be Sacramento State students. The Sacramento Police Department assisted Sacramento State police at the scene, and the case is being investigated solely by the campus police department.

A campus living under new restrictions

The President's Office emailed the campus at 8:52 a.m. on Monday, November 9, stating there was no ongoing threat and detailing increased security. The measures included an increased number of University Police patrols in the North Village, a suspension of guest privileges in the residence halls, and closed access to the Riverview Hall patio and several entrances. The North Village houses about 2,500 students across seven residence halls, and Klamath Hall alone houses about 200 residents, according to Sacramento State.

Students who lived through the night described both relief at the speed of the police response and frustration at the restrictions that followed. Julian Hernandez, a freshman childhood education major and Klamath Hall resident, said he was lying in bed when he heard three gunshots, and found his residential assistant on the phone with police, who ushered him into her room, where he saw a bullet hole. "I still feel pretty safe, especially with how fast the police responded," Hernandez said. Other residents, including freshman Marcus Ball of Riverview Hall, questioned how non-students were able to enter the building at all, while Mt. Whitney Hall resident Timothy Adkins said the university needed to balance safety with students' freedom.

Background: weapons arrests on this campus are rare

According to Sacramento State's 2026 Annual Security Report, there were six total campus arrests for weapon law violations from 2023 to 2025, and two of those arrests were in campus residential areas in 2025. The Klamath Hall shooting also came just days after a separate security scare on the same campus: on Friday, November 6, two suspects in a deadly Bakersfield Halloween party shooting were arrested on the Sacramento State campus by Kern County deputies — an unrelated case, but one that had already put campus safety in the spotlight before the dorm shooting.

What happens next

With Hicks in custody, the search continues for the five remaining suspects who fled towards J Street on November 8. Police have released photographs of the six suspects and continue to ask the community for help identifying them. For the roughly 200 freshmen who live in Klamath Hall — and the wider Punjabi and South Asian student families across California's Central Valley who follow campus safety news closely — the arrest is the first concrete answer in a case that raised a basic question no one on campus has stopped asking: how six people, three of them allegedly armed, got inside a locked residence hall late at night and got out before police could stop them.

This arrest follows the original November 8 shooting inside Klamath Hall, when six suspects fled and no arrests had yet been made. Read the earlier report: shots fired inside Klamath Hall