10 die at Texas school
Shootings at Santa Fe High wound 10 more; suspect in custody
up and told police that he did not have the courage to take his own life.
The deaths were all but certain to re-ignite the national debate over gun regulations, coming three months after the Parkland, Fla., 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 30 miles southeast of Houston. The wounded included a school police officer who was the first to confront the suspect and who was 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 was holding a door open for special education students in wheelchairs when a principal came bounding down the hall and telling everyone to run. Another teacher yelled, “It is real!” Students were led to take cover behind a car 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. He 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.
A woman who answered the phone at a number associated with the Pagourtzis family declined to speak. “Give us our time right now, thank you,” she said.
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, Texas Sen. John Cornyn said.
The assailant’s homemade explosives 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 carried 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 amso sorry this epidemic touched your town — Parkland will stand with you now and forever,” Marjory Stoneman Douglas student Jaclyn Corin said in a tweet.
She also directed her frustration at President Donald Trump, writing: “Our children are being MURDERED and you’re treating this like a game. This is the 22nd school shooting just this year. DO SOMETHING.”
Classmate David Hogg, who helped start the #NeverAgain movement with Corin, predicted that politicians would descend on the Texas campus, acting like they care, to boost their approval ratings.
Cameron Kasky echoed their sentiments on Twitter: “Prepare to watch the NRA boast about getting higher donations. Pre- State and federal law enforcement officers in tactical gear work outside a home in Alvin, Texas, as part of the investigation at Santa Fe High School.
pare to see students rise up and be called ci`vil terrorists’ and crisis actors. Prepare for the right-wing media to attack the survivors.”
On Friday, a handful of Twitter users began to question the facts of the Texas shooting, and at least one accused a Santa Fe student who told a local television station that she’d always felt like a shooting would eventually happen at her school of being a “#CrisisActor.”
In Texas, senior Logan Roberds said he was near the school’s art room when he heard a fire alarm and left the building with other students. Once outside, Roberds said, he heard two loud bangs. He initially thought somebody was hitting a trash can. Then came three more bangs.
“That’s when the teachers told us to run,” he said.
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 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.
In the aftermath of the Florida assault, survivors pulled all-nighters, petitioned city councils and state lawmakers, and organized protests in a grass-roots movement. Within weeks, state lawmakers adopted changes, including new weapons restrictions.
The move cemented the gun-friendly state’s break with the National Rifle Association. The NRA fought back with a lawsuit.
In late March, the teens spearheaded one of the largest student protest marches since Vietnam in Washington and inspired hundreds of other marches from California to Japan.
The calls for tighter gun controls that have swelled since February have barely registered in gun-loving Texas. Texas has some of the most permissive gun laws in the U.S. and just hosted the NRA’s annual conference earlier this month.