Officials: School gunman engaged within 4 minutes

SANTA FE, TEXAS >> An attorney for the 17-year-old charged with killing 10 people at a high school here last week said he still has no indication of what motivated the massacre and said he was not sure there would ever be a clear answer.

Even as authorities have not publicly identified a motive behind the bloodshed, they have slowly revealed more information about what happened inside the school, detailing the confrontation between police officers and Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the teen accused of committing the shooting.

Galveston County Sheriff Henry Trochesset said Monday that officers encountered the gunman within four minutes, “keeping him contained and engaged” so that other law enforcement officials could evacuate students and staff from the school.

“They contained him in that one area ... so he did no more damage,” Trochesset said at a briefing, although it remained unclear when the last victim was shot or killed. Trochesset was responding to uncertainty about why 30 minutes elapsed before the teen was taken into custody on Friday morning. Many mass shootings occur in a matter of minutes. The Parkland, Florida, massacre in February lasted six minutes, police said, with 17 dead and 17 wounded.

Among the officers who confronted Pagourtzis was John Barnes, a school resource officer, who was critically wounded. Walter Braun, chief of the Santa Fe school district’s police force, said Barnes has had ups and downs since the shooting. “Today is a down day,” Braun said.

Police said the shooting suspect confessed to officers the rampage that tore through a rural community outside Houston and reverberated around the world.

“That scene was horrific,” Trochesset said about what happened at the school, adding that his granddaughter was inside the school and three doors away from the gunfire.

Nick Poehl, an attorney for Pagourtzis, said he had met with his client three times since the shooting for a total of about 90 minutes. The teen is on suicide watch, police said.

Poehl said Pagourtzis, whom he described as “confused,” has not asked about who died during the shooting, and he did not say why the shooting began in the art room.