A 17-year-old armed with a shotgun and a pistol on Friday opened fire at a high school near Houston, Texas, killing 10 people, most of them students, authorities said.
It was the US’ deadliest such attack since a massacre in Florida that gave rise to a campaign by teens for gun control.
The suspected shooter, who was in custody on murder charges, also had explosive devices that were found in the school and nearby, said Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who called the assault “one of the most heinous attacks that we’ve ever seen in the history of Texas schools.”
Photo: Reuters
Investigators offered no immediate motive for the shooting.
The assailant intended to kill himself, but gave up and told police that he did not have the courage to take his own life, Abbott said.
The deaths were all but certain to reignite the national debate over gun regulations, coming just three months after the Parkland, Florida, attack that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
“It’s been happening everywhere. I’ve always kind of felt like that eventually it was going to happen here too,” Santa Fe High School student Paige Curry told Houston TV station KTRK. “I don’t know. I wasn’t surprised. I was just scared.”
Another 10 people were wounded at the school in Santa Fe, a city of about 13,000 people about 48km southeast of Houston. The wounded included a school police officer who was the first to confront the suspect and got shot in the arm.
Michael Farina, 17, said he was on the other side of campus when the shooting began and thought it was a fire drill.
He said he was holding a door open for special education students in wheelchairs when a principal came bounding down the hall and telling everyone to run.
He added that another teacher yelled out: “It is real!”
Students were led to take cover behind an auto shop across the street from the school.
Some still did not feel safe and began jumping the fence behind the shop to run even farther away, Farina said.
“I debated doing that myself,” he said.
The suspect was identified as Dimitrios Pagourtzis, who appeared to have no prior arrests or confrontations with law enforcement.
A woman who answered the telephone at a number associated with the Pagourtzis family declined to speak with reporters.
“Give us our time right now, thank you,” she said.
Pagourtzis played on the junior varsity football team and was a member of a dance squad with a local Greek Orthodox church.
Acquaintances described him as quiet and unassuming, an avid video game player who routinely wore a black trench coat and black boots to class.
The suspect obtained the shotgun and a .38-caliber handgun from his father, who owned them legally, Abbott said.
It was not clear whether the father knew his son had taken them.
Investigators were determining whether the shotgun’s shortened barrel was legal, US Senator John Cornyn said.
The assailant’s homemade explosives found at the school included pipe bombs, at least one Molotov cocktail and pressure-cooker bombs similar to those used in the Boston Marathon attack, authorities said.
While cable news channels broadcast hours of live coverage, survivors of the Feb. 14 Florida attack took to social media to express grief and outrage.
“My heart is so heavy for the students of Santa Fe High School. It’s an all too familiar feeling no one should have to experience. I am so sorry this epidemic touched your town — Parkland will stand with you now and forever,” Marjory Stoneman Douglas student Jaclyn Corin said on Twitter.
She also directed her frustration at US President Donald Trump, saying: “Our children are being MURDERED and you’re treating this like a game. This is the 22nd school shooting just this year. DO SOMETHING.”
Friday’s assault was the deadliest in Texas since a man with a semi-automatic rifle attacked a rural church late last year, killing more than two dozen people.
There were few prior clues about Pagourtzis’ behavior, unlike the shootings in Parkland and the church in Sutherland Springs, Abbott said, but added that the teen wrote in journals of wanting to carry out such an attack and then to end his own life.
“This young man planned on doing this for some time. He advertised his intentions, but somehow slipped through the cracks,” Cornyn said.
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