The full text of an SMS I received at 11:13am this morning:

Please check your campus e-mail for a mes­sage from the pres­i­dent about a homi­cide that occurred last night on S. Ellis Ave.

The text mes­sage was the first non-​test output of an emer­gency response system put in place at the U. of C. after the Vir­ginia Tech shoot­ings. The email, from U. of C. pres­i­dent Robert Zim­mer­man, related these fur­ther details:

It is with the great­est pos­si­ble sad­ness that I write to inform you of the tragic killing of one of our grad­u­ate stu­dents last night. Amadou Cisse, an inter­na­tional stu­dent com­plet­ing his Ph.D. degree in chem­istry, was shot and killed at 1:26 a.m. in the street near 6120 S. Ellis Ave. We are sad­dened and out­raged by this ter­ri­ble event, and our hearts go out to the student’s family, friends, col­leagues and neighbors.

Accord­ing to an arti­cle in today’s Tri­bune, Cisse was 28 29, a grad­u­ate stu­dent in chem­istry from Sene­gal whose research exam­ined atomic oxygen ero­sion. He suc­cess­fully defended his dis­ser­ta­tion last week, and was sched­uled to receive his degree on Decem­ber 7. The Uni­ver­sity will award his doc­tor­ate posthumously.

UPDATE (11/20/07):