A 15-year-old boy who had been picked on and had talked about shooting classmates allegedly opened fire at his high school, killing two people and wounding 13 in the deadliest US school attack since Columbine.
One student said the boy, a freshman, had a smile on his face as he fired away with a pistol at Santana High School in this middle-class San Diego suburb.
The student surrendered in the bathroom, dropped his gun and said he acted alone, telling officers: "It's just me," according to sheriff's officials.
The boy will be charged as an adult with murder, assault with a deadly weapon and gun possession, said San Diego County District Attorney Paul Pfingst, who identified the suspect as Charles Andrew Williams.
Students said they knew him as Andy Williams. He was to be arraigned today.
"We have established no real motive," Sheriff's Lieutenant Jerry Lewis said during a news conference on Monday night. "He did not have any particular targets in mind."
Sheriff and FBI officials served a search warrant on Monday night on the apartment where the teen lived with his father. They removed seven rifles, a computer, a plastic crate filled with papers and files, and about a half dozen bags filled with evidence. It wasn't immediately known who owned the guns. Officials with both agencies said they couldn't comment on the search.
The slain students were identified as Bryan Zuckor, 14, and Randy Gordon, 15. Authorities said one of the injured victims was a campus supervisor, while a student suffered minor injuries in a car accident while fleeing the 1,900-student school.
Fellow students and an adult acquaintance said they had heard the boy's threats over the weekend but thought he was joking and did not report him to authorities.
"He was picked on all the time," student Jessica Moore said. "He was picked on because he was one of the scrawniest guys. People called him freak, dork, nerd, stuff like that."
Student John Schardt, 17, was in a nearby classroom when the shooting started about 9:20am in a boys' restroom and spilled into a quad. "I looked at the kid, and he was smiling and shooting his weapon," Schardt said. "It was total chaos. People were trying to take cover."
Investigators said the boy used a .22-caliber revolver, stopping once to reload, and retreated after the shooting into the bathroom.
On Monday night, about 1,000 people gathered at Sonrise Community Church in Santee for a memorial service. The names of the two students killed and those who were wounded by the gunfire flashed on a video screen above an altar.
The attack was the deadliest US school shooting since the April 1999 bloodbath at Columbine High near Littleton, Colorado, where two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before committing suicide.
In Washington, President George W. Bush called the shooting "a disgraceful act of cowardice."
"This is my worst nightmare," Principal Karen Degiescher said. She said that the campus would be closed yesterday and that counselors were being called in to help students.
Classmates and acquaintances of the boy described him as skinny and the subject of constant harassment. Students said he boasted about owning a gun.
Over the weekend, the boy "was joking on and off that he was going to come to school and shoot people," said Joshua Stevens, 15, a friend of the boy. "He had it all planned out, but at the end of the weekend he said he was just joking and he wasn't really going to do it. "I said, `Like, you better be.' And he said, `No, I'm serious.'"
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has