Police at the scene on Monday
(Picture: AP)A woman and teenage girl were killed when a gunman broke into a Missouri secondary school and opened fire before being shot dead by police.
The shooting happened just after 9am local time on Monday, at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School in St Louis.
Two victims were tragically killed and six others wounded before the gunman - thought to be a man aged about 20 - also died following an exchange of gunfire with police.
Students were forced to barricade doors and huddle inside classrooms, jump from windows and run out of the building to seek safety during the incident.
One terrified girl said she was eye-to-eye with the shooter before his gun reportedly jammed and she was able to escape.
Others inside the school said they heard the shooter declare “you are all going to die”.
The city’s police chief said fast actions by a security guard and police officers who “ran to the gunfire” helped end the shooting before more people were killed or hurt.
Speaking at a news conference, Police Chief Michael Sack said the shooter was about 20 years old but did not provide a name for either him or his victims, and declined to say if the woman killed was a teacher.
St Louis Schools Superintendent Kelvin Adams said seven security guards were in the school at the time of the attack, each at an entry point of the locked building. One of the guards noticed the man struggling to get in at a locked door, notified school officials and ensured police were contacted, Mr Sack said.
“It was that timely response by that security officer, the fact that the door did cause pause for the suspect, that bought us some time,” he said.
He declined to say how the man eventually got inside, armed with what he described as a long gun.
Officers worked to get students out of the three-story brick building, then “ran to that gunfire, located that shooter and engaged that shooter in an exchange of gunfire,” killing him, Mr Sack said.
Central Visual and Performing Arts has 383 students and shares a building with another school, Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience, which has 336 students and was also evacuated.
Some of the six people hospitalised suffered gunshot wounds, while others were struck by shrapnel, Mr Sack said. He did not provide any information on their condition.
One student, 16-year-old Taniya Gholston, told the St Louis Post-Dispatch she was in a room when the shooter entered.
“All I heard was two shots and he came in there with a gun,” she said. “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.”
Ninth-grader Nylah Jones told the Post-Dispatch she was in a maths class when the shooter fired into the room from the hallway. He was unable to get into the room and instead banged on the door as students piled into a corner, she said.
The shooting left St Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones shaken.
“Our children shouldn’t have to experience this,” she said at the news conference. “They shouldn’t have to go through active shooter drills in case something happens. And unfortunately that happened today.”
The district placed all of its schools on lockdown for the remainder of the day, and cancelled all after-school activities.
Monday’s school shooting was the 40th this year resulting in injuries or death, according to a tally by Education Week — the most in any single year since it began tracking shootings in 2018.
These include the attack at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May, when 19 children and two teachers died.
Monday’s shooting came on the same day a Michigan teenager pleaded guilty to terrorism and first-degree murder in a school shooting that killed four students in December 2021.
