Distinct Abundance Patterns in Multiple Damped Ly-alpha Galaxies: Evidence for Truncated Star Formation?

(abridged) Following our previous work on metal abundances of a double damped Ly-alpha system with a line-of-sight separation ~2000 km/s (Ellison & Lopez 2001), we present VLT UVES abundances of 3 new systems spanning a total of \~6000 km/s at z~2.5 toward the southern QSO CTQ247. These abundances are supplemented with echelle observations of another `double' damped Ly-alpha system in the literature. We propose a definition in terms of velocity shift of the sub-class 'multiple damped Ly-alpha system', which is motivated by its possible connection with large-scale structure. We find that the abundance ratio alpha/Fe is systematically low in multiple systems compared with single systems, and with a small scatter. The same behavior is found in 2 more single DLA systems taken from the literature that show evidence of belonging to a galaxy group. After a careful investigation of possible sources of systematic errors, we conclude that the low alpha/Fe ratios in multiple DLAs have a nucleosynthetic origin. We suggest that they could be explained by reduced star formation in multiple damped Ly-alpha systems, possibly due to environmental effects.