Updated Thursday 5:31 p.m. Scary news up Interstate 91 as Wesleyan University has gone into lockdown after a student was shot dead in a bookstore near campus on Wednesday.  Officials at the school now say that the suspect in the shooting, who is still on the loose, may have been targeting Wesleyan and its Jewish students.

The authorities in Middletown, Conn., warned students and staff to stay indoors as they searched for the gunman.  The student, junior Johanna Justin-Jinich, 21, was shot inside the Red and Black Café inside Broad Street Books, a popular hangout near campus.

According to a statement posted Thursday morning to Wesleyan’s Web site, the suspected shooter has been identified as 29-year-old Stephen Morgan.  “We have now been made aware that he expressed threats in his personal journals toward Wesleyan and/or its Jewish students,” the statement read. “All students are urged to remain vigilant and to stay indoors. Additional security has been deployed accordingly.”

Justin-Jinich, who was Jewish, and Morgan had participated in a summer program together at New York University in 2007, and that Justin-Jinich had filed a harassment complaint against him that summer, according to The Associated Press. Some news reports described Morgan as her ex-boyfriend.

The Hartford Courant reported Thursday afternoon that a journal discovered in Morgan’s car, which he apparently abandoned outside the bookstore in Middletown, contained an entry in which Morgan said he planned to rape and kill Justin-Jinich before going on a shooting spree on the Wesleyan campus.

The school’s Spring Fling — scheduled for Wednesday with the artists King Khan and the Shrines, Clipse and Santigold — was canceled as a result of the slaying.

Yale has not had a student killed in a homicide since Suzanne Jovin ’99 was found stabbed to death in an East Rock neighborhood in 1998.

(Photo: The Associated Press)