Houston, May 18:
At least eight people were killed and around a dozen injured when a heavily-armed 17-year-old student opened fire at his Texas high school on Friday in the latest deadly school shooting to hit the United States.
US media reports identified the gunman, who was taken into custody, as Dimitrios Pagourtzis, a junior at Santa Fe High School in the city of the same name.
The Houston Chronicle said Pagourtzis was armed with an AR-15-style rifle, a pistol, a shotgun and pipe bombs when he burst into a classroom at the start of the school day.
“Officers inside encountered a bloody mess in the school,” a senior law enforcement official told the newspaper. “Evidently this guy threw pipe bombs all in there. We don’t know if any of them went off.”
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told reporters there were “multiple fatalities” from the shooting at the school located 30 mi
“There could be anywhere between eight to 10, the majority being students,” Gonzalez said.
One area hospital said eight people were brought there following the shooting while another hospital said it had admitted three.
One of the wounded was a police officer. Two of the victims were said to be in critical condition.
CNN and other media outlets reported that in addition to Pagourtzis, an 18-year-old student had been taken into custody as a possible accomplice.
Santa Fe school district police chief Walter Braun said “explosive devices” had been found in the school and “surrounding areas” and warned people to exercise caution.
The shooting was the latest in what has become an all-too-familiar situation in American schools, where gun violence has become a part of everyday life.
– ‘I shouldn’t be going through this’ –
“My friend got shot in the art hall,” a weeping Santa Fe student, Dakota Shrader, told reporters.
“I shouldn’t be going through this,” Shrader said as her mother comforted her. “It’s my school. This is my daily life. I feel scared to even go back.
Shrader said fire alarms went off “and everybody just started running outside.
“And the next thing you know everybody looks and you hear ‘boom, boom, boom’ and I just ran as fast as I could to the nearest forest so I could hide and I called my Mom.”
Earlier this year, 17 students and staff were killed at a Florida high school — a massacre that prompted survivors to launch a grassroots campaign against gun violence. (AFP)
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