A 13-year-old French boy set out on Tuesday to mow down his teachers with a shotgun but abandoned the plan when he arrived at the school and found it surrounded by police, officials said.
The boy’s parents raised the alarm when they realized he had taken the family gun from their house near Beauvais, north of Paris, and was headed to his school in Beauvais itself, officials said.
The teenager was in custody on suspicion of attempted murder and admitted his homicidal intentions during an interview, Beauvais prosecutor James Juan said in a statement.
He wanted “to attack his teachers who quarreled with him even though he had done nothing [wrong],” Juan said.
The boy, said to be a video game enthusiast, had left a message on his blog on Monday stating that “this is the last day of my life.”
“He left his home with a loaded hunting rifle and 25 cartridges,” senior local official Raymond Yeddou said.
“He went in the direction of the school where, according to his declarations, he intended to kill his teachers,” Yeddou said.
But when he saw a major police presence in front of and inside the school he abandoned his plan and instead headed to a cyber cafe in Beauvais town center where his parents later found him.
Police warned the head of the 2,000-pupil Saint Esprit school to keep his students confined to their classrooms as the drama unfolded.
The alarm was raised at 8:15am by the boy’s parents, who had become concerned by his unusual behavior and searched their house, finding the gun and ammunition gone.
Though generally a good student, the source said, the boy has recently had problems at school and was worried about a parent-teacher meeting scheduled for Tuesday.
The Beauvais prosecutor said the boy wanted to stop the meeting at the academically high-achieving school from going ahead.
Dominique Moutin, the head of the school, said nothing in the boy’s behavior had suggested that Tuesday’s events were likely.
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