Two killed in California school shooting
Students file out of Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, Calif., after a shooter killed two and hurt three more.
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — Frantic parents texted with teenagers barricaded in classrooms. Others offered shelter to students fleeing their high school in this sleepy suburb north of Los Angeles on Thursday. It was the latest example of a wrenching sequence that has become a recurring nightmare for families in America.
This time it was a little after 7:30 a.m. when a young man opened fire at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, killing two students and wounding three others before turning the gun on himself, authorities said.
The 16-year-old suspect was said to be in grave condition after shooting himself in the head. Law enforcement officials said he is a student at Saugus High School and that Thursday was his birthday. The students who died were a 16-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy; the other victims were identified as a 14-year-old girl, a 15year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy.
Jeremy Thompson first learned about the shooting when his younger son, a sophomore at Saugus, called him early Thursday.
“Kids today, they never call, so you get this call, and you automatically wonder what it’s going to be,” Thompson said from a parent reunification center nearby.
The sophomore told his father that there had been shots fired at school and that he was walking away from the building toward his mother’s house. His older son, a senior, told him by text that he and his classmates had barricaded themselves in a classroom and covered up the windows.
It was a quiet morning on the campus when the gunman pulled a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol from his backpack and opened fire in the quad. There were no rounds of ammunition in the gun when it was recovered, said Capt. Kent Wegener of the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department. The shooting was captured on video, he said.
Little is known about the suspect or his motive.
Wegener said the suspect’s girlfriend and mother were with detectives at the Santa Clarita Valley station. Officers also searched the suspect’s home, he said, which is about a mile away from the school.
Authorities say the biography on an Instagram account believed to belong to the gunman said, “Saugus, have fun at school tomorrow.”
Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials say the message was posted Thursday morning but it’s unclear when. They say it was later removed, and they don’t know who made the change.
People who knew the suspect described him as a quiet, smart kid who they’d never expect would violently snap.
One fellow junior at Saugus High School said he was a Boy Scout whom she relied on to study for advanced placement European history. A next-door neighbor who knew the boy as they grew up said he kept to himself but was never threatening.
Brooke Risley, a junior at Saugus High, said she had known the boy since elementary school and saw him Wednesday in engineering class.
On Thursday, she couldn’t recall anything indicating he might be violent. The closest she could think of was a keychain he had with a hollow bullet.
Risley described the boy as somewhat introverted, though open with his close friends, and “naturally smart.” She said he wasn’t bullied, had a girlfriend and had been an active member of a local Boy Scout troop.
Joe Fitzpatrick, a senior who helped the teacher in the boy’s physics class, called him a “good, quiet kid” who didn’t miss assignments and did well on tests.
“He just seemed like one of those regular kids,” Fitzpatrick said.