The 19-year-old gunman who killed a teacher and a 15-year-old girl at a St Louis high school was armed with an AR-15-style rifle and what appeared to be more than 600 rounds of ammunition, the local police commissioner, Michael Sack, said on Tuesday.
Orlando Harris also left behind a handwritten note offering his explanation for the shooting on Monday at Central Visual and Performing Arts high school. Tenth-grader Alexandria Bell and 61-year-old physical education teacher Jean Kuczka died, and seven students were wounded.
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 year since it began tracking shootings in 2018. The deadly attacks include the killings at Robb elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in May, where 19 children and two teachers died.
Monday’s St Louis shooting occurred 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.
Police killed the gunman in an exchange of gunfire to put an end to an episode that has renewed calls for officials to tighten public access to high-powered rifles, even after Congress passed a bill earlier this year that aimed to make obtaining firearms harder for some people who are considered to be at risk of carrying out violence.
Sack read the note in which the young man lamented that he had no friends, no family, no girlfriend and a life of isolation. In the note, he called it the “perfect storm for a mass shooter”.
Sack said the shooter had some ammo strapped to his chest and some in a bag, and other magazines were found dumped in stairwells.
The attack forced students to barricade doors and huddle in classroom corners, jump from windows and run out of the building to seek safety. One terrorized girl said she was eye-to-eye with the shooter before his gun apparently jammed and she was able to run out. Several people inside the school said they heard the gunman warn, “You are all going to die!”
The attacker, 19, graduated from the school last year. The FBI was assisting police in the investigation. Sack, speaking at a news conference, urged people to come forward when someone who appears to be suffering from mental illness or distress begins “speaking about purchasing firearms or causing harm to others”.
Relatives of those killed mourned their losses.
“Alexandria was my everything,” her father, Andre Bell, told KSDK-TV. “She was joyful, wonderful and just a great person.
“She was the girl I loved to see and loved to hear from. No matter how I felt, I could always talk to her and it was all right. That was my baby.”
Abby Kuczka said her mother was killed when the gunman burst into her classroom and she moved between him and her students.
“My mom loved kids,” Kuczka told the St Louis Post-Dispatch. “She loved her students. I know her students looked at her like she was their mom.”
The seven injured students are all 15 or 16 years old. All were listed in stable condition. Sack said four suffered gunshot or graze wounds, two had bruises and one had a broken ankle – apparently from jumping out of the three-story building.
The school in south St Louis was locked, with seven security guards near each door, the local schools superintendent, Kelvin Adams, said. A security guard initially became alarmed when he saw the gunman trying to get in one of the doors. He was armed with a gun and “there was no mystery about what was going to happen. He had it out and entered in an aggressive, violent manner,” Sack said.
That guard alerted school officials and made sure police were contacted.
The shooter managed to get inside anyway. Sack declined to say how, saying he didn’t want to “make it easy” for anyone else who wants to break into a school.
Sack offered this timeline of events: a 911 call came in at 9.11am alerting police of an active shooter. Officers – some off duty wearing street clothes – arrived at 9.15am. Police located the attacker at 9.23am and began shooting at him. He was shot at 9.25am and secured by police at 9.32am.
The 11 minutes between the first 911 call and the time when police confronted the gunman draw a stark contrast with the 77 minutes it took police in Uvalde to confront the shooter there in May during the officers’ much-maligned response.
The attacker was armed with nearly a dozen 30-round high-capacity magazines, Sack said.
“This could have been much worse,“ he said.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
