Video footage of the scene at a Missouri high school shooting shows police officers helping students flee the deadly violence.
The shooting took place shortly after 9am at Central VPA High School in St Louis, the St Louis Post-Dispatch reported. An adult woman and a female student have died, Lt Colonel Michael Sack during a press conference after the violence.
The shooter, identified as a 20-year-old male, was killed after engaging in gunfire with law enforcement. He was declared dead at the hospital, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Sack, the interim chief of the St Louis Police Department, said during a press conference.
Disturbing videos and images from the scene show law enforcement helping students come out of the building and escape the violence. Desperate parents were also seen running toward the scene, trying to find their children.
A student also told KMOV-TV that they were in a dance class when a male with a “long gun” stormed inside the room and asked, “Are you ready to die?”
Several students told the Post-Dispatch they first thought it was a drill, until they heard the principal say the code word for a shooting. Once they realised the magnitude of the threat, students jumped out of windows or cornered inside their classrooms.
“Once you heard the boom,” Michael De Filippo, a teacher at Central VPA told the Post-Dispatch. “All the chuckling and laughing in the back of the room stopped.”
“All I heard was two shots and he came in there with a gun,” 16-year-old Taniya Gholston also told the outlet.
“And I was trying to run and I couldn’t run. Me and him made eye contact but I made it out because his gun got jammed. But we saw blood on the floor.”
David Williams, a math teacher at the school, also told Post-Dispatch that the principal came over the loudspeaker around 9am.
Mr Williams told the outlet he heard multiple shots outside his classroom, and one of the windows on the classroom door was shot out. He then heard a man say, “You are all going to f***ing die.”
Teens were transported in buses to a safe area in Gateway STEM High School, where they were reunited with their parents.
All the schools in the St Louis public school district have been placed on a “hard lockdown.” School officials said that counselors will be made available for teens in every school.
