An accomplished photography professor at Oberlin College in Ohio and his wife were found shot to death at their home on Wednesday, according to the authorities, who said that the professor’s son had been arrested and charged with murder.
The shootings jolted the Oberlin campus, which is about 35 miles southwest of Cleveland, and visual artists who had known him.
The professor, Pipo Nguyen-duy, 64, who had taught at the college since 1998 and was its studio art chairman, and his wife, Tran Thi Phong, 56, were identified by the Oberlin Police Department as the victims.
Daniel Jones, 31, of Ashland, Ore., who the police said was Mr. Nguyen-duy’s son and Ms. Phong’s stepson, was charged with six counts of murder, four counts of felonious assault and one count of tampering with evidence, the authorities said.
A motive was not immediately clear.
In a statement, Carmen Twillie Ambar, Oberlin’s president, described Mr. Nguyen-duy, who was known as Pipo, as a beloved member of the college community whose passion for photography touched everyone.
Mr. Nguyen-duy, who was born in Vietnam and came to the United States as a political refugee, had received numerous honors for his photography over the years, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, according to his biography.
“Our community will be hurting for a very long time, and when the shock of this news subsides, we will all need to process our grief,” Ms. Ambar said.
Around 9 a.m. on Wednesday, officers responded to a car fire in a parking lot at the college’s music conservatory, according to a police report. Investigators found a wood stove heater in the back seat of the Toyota hatchback, which had Oregon plates and was registered to Mr. Jones, with a makeshift chimney pipe protruding from the roof, the authorities said.
Officers discovered Mr. Jones’s wallet, passport and live ammunition rounds inside the car before finding him about a mile away over an hour later, the police said.
Based on the officers’ interactions with Mr. Jones, they went to his family’s home — about two blocks from where they had responded to the car fire — to conduct a wellness check, investigators said.
After forcing their way into the home, officers found Mr. Nguyen-duy’s body on the first floor and Ms. Phong’s in an upstairs bedroom, the authorities said. Both had been shot multiple times, the police said.
Jenifer Berki Merrill, a lawyer for Mr. Jones, declined to comment about the charges on Thursday. She said that Mr. Jones preferred to go by his birth name, Asia Nguyen-duy.
On Thursday, police officers carried him by his arms and legs into Oberlin Municipal Court for an initial hearing in his case, a video taken by WKYC-TV showed.
He slumped over in a chair while wearing handcuffs and beige-and-pink striped jail clothes during the proceeding.
A judge set his bond at $3 million and he remained in custody on Thursday afternoon, according to court records.
Edie Carey, 21, a senior at Oberlin, said in an interview on Thursday that she had taken four or five classes taught by Mr. Nguyen-duy, and that he had become her favorite professor.
“I feel like the college experience I was promised of becoming really close with someone who knows so much was really only fulfilled by my relationship with him,” she said.
“His teaching wasn’t like anything else I had experienced,” she added. “It was really kind of holistic. He really changed how I see the world.”
Ms. Carey, who worked as a photo lab monitor for the studio art department overseen by Mr. Nguyen-duy, said he would regale his students with fascinating stories about his life.
He told them about competing nationally in table tennis as a teenager in Vietnam and becoming a Buddhist monk in northern India, which required him to shave his head, she said. When he moved to the East Village in New York City in the 1980s, he was hired as a bouncer, she said.
Ms. Carey said that students had set up tributes to Mr. Nguyen-duy on campus, including photographs he had taken. She credited him with inspiring her to pursue a career as an artist after she graduates.
“I always thought about him being there for me,” she said.
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