Texas police said they were seeking a gunman on Sunday who fired randomly at a Halloween homecoming party packed with hundreds of college students, leaving at least two dead and wounding about a dozen more.

Authorities said they believed the unidentified male suspect, who is gone into hiding, may have gone to the off-campus party intending to shoot a particular person, and fired his handgun into the crowd afterwards.

"We believe this is a separate incident. There might have been someone there who was targeted," Hunt County Sheriff Randy Meeks told a news conference on Sunday morning. 

The shooting happened around midnight on Saturday in Greenville, about 80 km northeast of Dallas, shortly after deputies went to a hangar-like facility called The Party Venue to deal with parking violations, Meeks said.

Over 750 partygoers, many of them students at a campus of Texas A & M University in Commerce, about 24 km away, were at the party when shots were fired near the back of the facility, he said.

"When the shots were fired it was complete chaos as people fled for safety and deputies attempted to locate the shooter," Meeks said

He added that some people cut themselves on broken glass as they tried to squeeze through windows.

A total of 16 people, including four or five students, sought treatment for injuries, 12 of them for gunshot wounds, Meeks said, adding that their conditions were not known. 

The two partygoers who were killed were not identified.

The investigation, which was being aided by the Texas Rangers and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was hampered by a lack of cooperation from those in attendance, Meeks said.

"It appalls me that as many folks that were there have not been able to give us a better description of this shooter.

"With this many people there, normally we would have a really good description of the shooter," he said, adding that investigators had interviewed 20 people.

-Reuters