SCHOOL MARKSMAN
Calif. killer skilled, lots of guns: cops
The teenager who opened fire at his Southern California high school — killing two fellow students and wounding three other innocents — was an apparently skilled shooter who had access to a slew of guns, police officials said on Friday.
Armed with a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, Nathaniel Berhow, 16, carried out the deadly rampage at Santa Clarita’s Saugus HS on Thursday morning and turned the gun on himself in just 16 seconds, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva told reporters.
Berhow died of his self-inflicted wound at a hospital with his mother at his side on Friday, the Los Angeles Sheriff ’s Department said.
During his short spree, the shooter quickly “cleared a malfunction” on the gun and fired approximately six bullets, emptying the weapon, Villanueva said.
The sheriff noted that surveillance video that captured the attack apparently showed Berhow “counting his rounds.”
“We know it was a planned attack. It was deliberate. He knew how many rounds he had, for example,” Villanueva said.
“He seemed very familiar with firing the weapon,” he added.
The sheriff said the killer was dropped off at the 2,300student school by his mom before the 7:30 a.m. attack.
“As far as we know, the actual targets were at random,” Villanueva said. “He was just standing by himself, at one point walked to the center of the quad center, dropped the backpack and just started firing.”
Gracie Anne Muehlberger, 15, and Dominic Blackwell, 14, were identified Friday as the two slain victims.
Authorities recovered several firearms from Berhow’s home, as well as six firearms that were registered to the shooter’s late father, identified as Mark Berhow.
The origins of the gun the teen shooter used in the attack remained unclear, said Villanueva, who added that several of the weapons found in the house “were not the ones registered to the father” and that some were unregistered.
Mark Berhow was an “avid sportsman” who “loved big-game hunting and fishing of all kinds,” according to an obituary for him.
A former childhood friend of the younger Berhow, Ryan McCracken, 20, told KTLA that Mark Berhow “used to make bullets.”
Mark Berhow died in December 2017 from a heart attack, but a “history of chronic alcoholism” contributed to his death, the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office told The Post.
Two years before his death, the elder Berhow had been arrested over a domestic dispute with the boy’s mother.
Villanueva said on Friday that it remained “a mystery” as to why teen shot up his high school.
He did not leave any manifesto, writings or notes, officials said.