MERCED, Calif. — A male college student burst into a morning class at a university with a hunting knife Tuesday and may have killed his intended victim if not for the heroic intervention of a construction worker who ran into the room to break up the attack.

The construction worker and three others were wounded, but all are expected to survive. The alleged assailant, described as a student in his 20s, was shot and killed by campus police as he fled the scene at the University of California, Merced.

Two of the injured had to be airlifted to hospitals, and the other two were treated on campus. Authorities didn’t release the name of the assailant or his victims.

The incident began when the assailant used a knife to stab two people in a second-floor room around the start of an 8 a.m. class, Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke said.

A construction worker rushed in, distracted the attacker and was also stabbed. Warnke credited the worker with saving one of the victims.

“I think he prevented this first student from dying,” Warnke said. “He didn’t go in knowing that there was a stabbing taking place. He went in thinking there was a fight.”

The Merced Sun Star identified the construction worker as Byron Price, 31. Price’s father said he was treated and released from the hospital.

Warnke said the suspect fled the room after attacking the construction worker and ran down two flights of stairs to the outside, where he stabbed a school employee sitting on a bench. The suspect was fatally shot by pursuing campus police on a nearby foot bridge.

The university about 120 miles south of Sacramento in the farm-rich San Joaquin Valley was locked down for about an hour and a half after the stabbings. The lockdown was lifted, but classes were canceled and entrances to the campus were blocked off.

Campus officials said the university, which has about 6,000 students, also would be closed Thursday.

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