Angry boy shoots teacher, students

A 12-year-old student armed with a semi-automatic handgun shot and killed a maths teacher and critically wounded two classmates before killing himself at his Nevada middle school yesterday, law enforcement officials said.

Witnesses described a chaotic scene at the school in the northwestern Nevada town of Sparks, just east of Reno near the California border, after the gunfire erupted outside classrooms as students were arriving for the school day.

‘‘A kid started getting mad and he pulled out a gun and shoots my friend, one of my friends at least,’’ a seventhgrade student identified as Andrew Thompson told the local television station. ‘‘And then he walked up to a teacher and says back up. The teacher started backing up and he pulled the trigger.’’

‘‘The teacher was just lying there and he was limp,’’ he said. ‘‘And me and five other friends went to him and said come on we’ve got to get him to safety. We picked him up, carried him a little bit far and we left him because our viceprincipal came along and said go, go, go get to safety, get to safety. So we left the teacher there and we went to safety.’’

The incident marked the latest in a string of shooting rampages across the United States in recent years, including a shooting last December at a Connecticut elementary school that killed 20 students and six adults and helped reignite a national debate over gun control.

The dead man was identified as math teacher Michael Landsberry, 45.

The two wounded students, both age 12, were rushed to a Reno hospital where one had emergency surgery.

One suffered a gunshot wound to the shoulder and the other was hit in the abdomen, and were listed in stable condition last night.