2 killed, 17 hurt in Kentucky school shooting

‘Determined’ gunman ‘knew what he was doing,’ an eyewitness says. A 15-year-old student is arrested.

BENTON, Ky. — A 15year-old student killed two classmates and hit a dozen others with gunfire Tuesday, methodically shooting a handgun inside a crowded atrium at his rural Kentucky high school, authorities said.

“He was determined. He knew what he was doing,” said Alexandria Caporali, 16, who grabbed her stunned friend and ran into a classroom as other students hit the floor.

“It was one right after another — bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,” she said. “You could see his arm jerking as he was pulling the trigger.”

He kept firing, she said, until he ran out of ammunition and took off running, trying to get away.

Police arrested the student moments later.

Authorities did not identify the gunman responsible for the nation’s first fatal school shooting of 2018, nor did they release any details about a motive. They said he would be charged with murder and attempted murder.

Kentucky State Police Lt. Michael Webb said detectives were looking into the boy’s home and background. “He was apprehended by the sheriff ’s department here on site, at the school, thankfully before any more lives could be taken,” Webb said.

Seventeen students were injured, 12 of them hit with bullets and five others hurt in the scramble as hundreds of students f led for their lives from Marshall County High School. Many jumped into cars, or ran across fields and down the highway, some not stopping until they reached a McDonald’s restaurant more than a mile away.

Parents left their cars on both sides of an adjacent road, desperately trying to find their children.

The two fatalities were 15 years old: Bailey Nicole Holt died at the scene and Preston Ryan Cope died at a hospital, Kentucky State Police Commissioner Richard Sanders said.

Preston was among six boys flown about 120 miles to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. Sanders said the five others were in critical condition.

The attack marked the year’s first fatal school shooting, 23 days into 2018, according to data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, which relies on media reports and other information. The anti-violence group Everytown for Gun Safety has counted at least 283 shootings at schools since 2013.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin and several people in Benton said they couldn’t believe a mass shooting would happen in their small town. But many such shootings across the nation have happened in rural communities.

Marshall County High School is about 30 minutes from Heath High School in Paducah, Ky., where a 1997 mass shooting killed three people and injured five others. Michael Carneal, then 14, opened fire there about two years before the fatal attack at Columbine High School in Colorado, ushering in an era of mass shootings at schools.

“It’s horrifying that we can no longer call school shootings ‘unimaginable,’ because the reality is they happen with alarming frequency,” said former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who survived being shot in the head in 2011.