Two killed in shooting at St. Louis high school
Gunman also dead after a police shoot-out
ST. LOUIS — Messiah Miller was sitting in algebra class on Monday morning when he heard the first gunshot. Maybe it was just noise from the construction site across the street, he and his classmates reassured themselves.
Then they heard an urgent message from the principal over the intercom: “Miles Davis is in the building.”
That is the code that informs students and teachers at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School that an “active shooter” had breached the building. It sent students in the algebra class scrambling to hide. Miller texted five people, including his mother, to tell them that he loved them.
“We heard more shots, and they were getting closer and closer,” said Miller, 16. “Then he jiggled our door. But he didn’t come in.”
At least two people in the school were killed and seven others injured before the gunman was killed in a shoot-out with the police, the authorities said, as another American school transformed Monday from a quiet place of learning to a scene of terror, panic, and violence. Students cowered under desks or jumped out windows and wondered if they were going to survive.
Lieutenant Colonel Michael Sack, the interim commissioner of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, said the victims included an adult woman who died at a hospital after the shooting and a teenage girl who was pronounced dead at the scene. Others who were hurt “suffered a variety of injuries, from shrapnel injuries to gunshots,” Sack said.
He said the suspected gunman appeared to have been about 20 years old, but did not name him. The suspect also died at a hospital, Sack said.
“Here is a safe place where kids go to grow, to learn, to develop, and something like this happens — it’s just heartbreaking,” he said of the school.
Once they were evacuated from the building, students were taken to the parking lot of a nearby grocery store to be reunited with their parents.
In the aftermath of the shooting, police officers stood outside the school in south St. Louis, and yellow police tape lined one side of the building. Women sat on a bench, holding hands and praying for the victims.
“Police responded quite heavily and quite quickly” to reports of a shooting just after 9 a.m., said Lori Willis, a spokeswoman for the St. Louis Public Schools, who added that seven safety officers employed by the school district were already in the building at the time of the shooting. Photos published by local news outlets and shared on social media showed dozens of police cars at the busy intersection outside the school.
The performing arts school shares a campus with another high school, the Collegiate School of Medical and Bioscience, and both were on lockdown Monday morning.
It was not immediately clear how the gunman was able to enter the school, or whether he had any connection to it. Sack said the building was locked, with doors secured, before the gunman, who was “armed with a long gun,” arrived.
“The shooter was quickly stopped by police inside,” the district said on Twitter. Willis said the gunman was described as slim and dressed entirely in black.
Kelvin Adams, the superintendent of schools for the St. Louis Public School District, credited members of the school’s faculty and staff for rallying the students to evacuate the building quickly.
Kristie Faulstich was in the middle of teaching a lesson on trade and empires to her sophomore world history class when she heard the “Miles Davis” code for an active shooter over the intercom. She said she quickly locked her classroom door, turned off the lights and instructed her class of about 20 students to move to the corner of the room.
Within a minute of her locking the classroom, Faulstich heard someone “pulling drastically” at the door and trying to get in. The person couldn’t, and moved on.
Faulstich, who said she had served in the Army until 2018, said that at one point she had heard about 20 rounds fired. In the moment, Faulstich said, she was “mentally preparing for how to defend my kids.”
“I wasn’t going to say, ‘Nobody is going to hurt you,’ because that’s a promise I couldn’t make,” she said. “You get into this head space: I will do whatever it takes, and I will protect you however I have to. I know that’s how the teachers were in this moment. Those are our kids.”