10 die at Texas school ‘He said, “Surprise,” and then he started shooting,’ one survivor says
SANTA FE, Texas — Ten people were killed in a shooting Friday morning at a high school in Southeast Texas by a student wielding two of his father’s guns, authorities said. Police were also investigating explosive devices found at the school and elsewhere in the community.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said that in addition to the 10 people slain, another 10 people were injured in the rampage at Santa Fe High School, about 34 miles southeast of Houston.
Most of those killed were students, said Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, who said the shooting occurred shortly before 8 a.m.
The massacre came just three months after a gunman killed 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
Gonzalez said a student, identified as Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, was taken into custody. Officials said the teen apparently had a clean slate before the massacre. Another student was being questioned, Gonzalez said. Abbott said a third person who authorities think might have “certain information” will be interviewed
by police, although he did not elaborate on what the person might know or their relationship to the attacker.
The attacker was wielding two guns — a shotgun and a .38 revolver — both of which were owned by his father, according to Abbott. He said it was unclear whether the gunman’s father knew his son had taken the weapons.
“It’s impossible to describe the magnitude of the evil of someone who would attack innocent children in a school,” said Abbott, who six months earlier had also decried “acts of evil” after a gunman killed more than two dozen people inside a Texas church.
Pagourtzis, 17, has been charged with capital murder and aggravated assault of a peace officer and booked in the Galveston County jail on no bond, authorities said.
After the shooting, police and federal authorities could be seen blocking off an address linked to Pagourtzis’s mother and were going in and out of the home for hours.
Abbott said that the shooter had journals documenting his thoughts on both his computer and his cellphone. The shooter said that “not only did he want to commit the shooting, but he wanted to commit suicide after,” Abbott said.
Instead, he said, the attacker gave himself up to police.
Isabelle Laymance, a 15-year-old who said she was inside one of the classes where the shooting took place, said the attacker shot an officer when police began to speak to him. The attacker repeatedly told police he would surrender if they talked to him, Laymance said.
“He kept saying if I come out, don’t shoot me,” she said. “They didn’t shoot him, they just put him in handcuffs.”
“The suspected shooter had posted to Facebook a photo of a T-shirt with the words “Born to kill” written on it,” Abbott said, describing it as perhaps the most significant red flag that had been found so far.
Galveston County authorities urged people in the community to be wary of suspicious devices after explosives were found in and around the school. Abbott said at least one was a Molotov cocktail.
“There have been explosive devices found in the high school and surrounding areas adjacent to the high school,” Walter Braun, chief of the Santa Fe Independent School District Police Department, said in a news conference. District officials said law enforcement officers were “in the process of rendering them safe,” adding that the school had been evacuated.
Among the injured was one of Braun’s police officers, he said.
The chief medical officer at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Gulshan Sharma, told reporters that school police officer John Barnes was in critical condition with a gunshot wound and in danger of “bleeding out” when he arrived via helicopter transport. Doctors stabilized him, Sharma said, but he was still undergoing treatment Friday afternoon.
Barnes, 49, was shot while confronting the shooter, said Captain Jim Dale of the Houston Police Department, who spoke with Barnes’s family and with other police officers at the Galveston hospital where he was being treated.
Dale said Barnes was one of the first on the scene to engage the suspect.
“He was the one running in while everyone’s running out,” Dale said. Barnes, who recently retired from the Houston police, lost a lot of blood soon after he was shot, Dale said. The school district’s assistant police chief applied a tourniquet, Dale said, which helped save Barnes’s life as he was flown to the medical center for treatment.
Witnesses described panic and confusion at the school as the shots were fired. Students in an art room fled as the gunman came inside and a fire alarm went off.
Laymance was in one of the art classrooms. About 20 people were in the class, and they were finishing their project drawing geometric shapes when “out of nowhere we heard multiple gunshots, so we all just got up and ran,” she said.
The back door was locked, Laymance said, so she ran into the supply closet connecting two art classes. She was among eight students seeking shelter there behind a locked door.
“He was shooting people who were running out of the classroom,” she said.
Then the shooter began to fire inside the closet.
“He said, ‘Surprise,’ and then he started shooting and he killed one or two people,” she said.
Laymance said the attacker continued firing into the closet, pumping bullet after bullet inside, hitting one person in the head and another in the leg.
“I was laying down and I called the police and my mom,” she said. “I was just trying not to make noises. I was laying down on the ground and my friend was holding my hand and we were just trying to keep everyone quiet that was in there.”
Eventually, she said, they fled the supply closet into the other art classroom “because that’s where the police were.”
Parents were picking up their children early from other schools in the area as they reeled from the horror that had come to their community.
“I just need to cuddle [my] baby girl,” said Catharine Lindsey, a parent who lives nearby and said she could hear the rescue helicopters from her home. “Ever since Parkland I’ve had to tell my 13-year-old daughter to not be a hero, to hide and stay safe with teacher if something like this happens, because she’s the type who would try and talk the shooter down.”
Some students in Santa Fe said they were shocked at what had happened. Others said it seemed inevitable that this type of attack would eventually spread to their school. “I was thinking it was going to happen eventually,” one student told TV station KPRC in Houston. “It’s been happening everywhere.”