The University Police Department responded to a call around 2 a.m. involving a San Jose State student with a knife, threatening three other students, in the Campus Village on Wednesday.
George, an SJSU business sophomore who prefers to go by his first name for privacy concerns, said the student with the knife targeted him and chased him around Tenth Street.
“I looked at his hand and saw he had a knife so I decided we should probably just leave, but once I started to back away into the grass area he told me to come back to him and then he started chasing me,” George said.
George said the knife-wielding student chased him from the grass area between Campus Village C and Campus Village B until he was forced to cross Tenth Street and take cover at Sammy G’s Pizzeria.
George said as soon as he saw the student had a knife, he called UPD and they responded to the scene in less than five minutes.
UPD Captain Frank Belcastro said the incident started when a student inside a Campus Village C suite started throwing ketchup packets from their window at three students who were outside down below.
“[The four students] got into a verbal argument [and then] one of the students came [down from his room] and they continued their verbal argument,” Belcastro said.“It went into a shoving match and one student put his hand in his pocket. The other student choked him out and when he got up, he did pull a knife and brandished it at them.”
Belcastro said nobody was injured from the incident and the knife-wielding student, whose name hasn’t been released, received a misdemeanor citation.
Mechanical engineering freshman Asha Dehmoubed said when he and George saw the knife, they took off running in different directions.
Dehmoubed said when he noticed George was the one being chased, he went back to Campus Village to make sure his friend was OK.
He said when he found his friends, the student with the knife was standing calmly at the scene with his roommates until UPD came.
“He was like, slightly calm and he was with one of his roommates,” Dehmoubed said. “I then said ‘bro, do you still have the knife on you?’ He said yeah and then I yelled ‘throw the knife on the ground’ and he just did it.”
