[Authorities] prepare to enter Calhoun Hall at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas on Tuesday Sept. 28, 2010. A gunman opened fire Tuesday inside the Perry-Castaneda Library then fatally shot himself, and police are searching for a possible second suspect, university police said. (AP Photo/The Daily Texan, Tamir Kalifa)
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AUSTIN, Texas - A man wearing dark clothes and a ski mask opened fire with an assault rifle Tuesday morning inside a University of Texas library, then fatally shot himself in the head.
Police said they believe the gunman was a student who acted alone, killing himself on the sixth floor of the library.
Officials have ruled out the possibility of a second shooter. The initial confusion was because the suspect fired shots in multiple locations, campus police Chief Robert Dahlstrom said.
The university issued an all clear notice by the early afternoon, adding on its emergency information website that the school remains closed and that the area around the Perry-Castenada Library was still an active crime scene.
"We anticipate campus being completely open and back to normal" by Wednesday morning, Austin police Chief Art Acevedo said.
The 50,000-student campus _ the site of one of the nation's deadliest shooting rampages four decades ago _ had been on lockdown while officers with bomb-sniffing dogs carried out a building-by-building manhunt.
Dahlstrom said the suspect wore dark clothes and a ski mask.
Randall Wilhite, an adjunct law professor at the university, said he was driving to class when he saw "students start scrambling behind wastebaskets, trees and monuments," and then a young man carrying an assault rifle sprinting along the street.
"He was running right in front of me ... and he shot what I thought were three more shots ... not at me. In my direction, but not at me, clearly not at me," Wilhite said.
The professor said the gunman had the opportunity to shoot several students and Wilhite, but he did not.
No shots were fired by law enforcement, Acevedo said.
Tuesday's shooting is not the first at the school.
On Aug. 1, 1966, Charles Whitman went to the 28th floor observation deck at the UT clock tower in the middle of campus and began shooting at people below. He killed 16 people and wounded nearly three dozen before police killed him about 90 minutes after the siege began.
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Associated Press writers April Castro and Jim Vertuno in Austin, Ramit Plushnick-Masti in Houston and Diana Heidgerd in Dallas contributed to this report.
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