Fourteen students and one teacher were killed Tuesday during a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said.
Abbott said the suspected shooter, an 18-year-old, believed to be from Uvalde also died.
“He shot and killed horrifically, incomprehensibly, 14 students and killed a teacher. The shooter, he himself is deceased and its believed that responding officers killed him,” Abbott told a news briefing.
Uvalde’s district chief of police Pedro “Pete” Arredondo confirmed during a press conference Tuesday that the suspect is dead, noting they are believed to have acted alone during the “heinous” crime.
Arredondo called the shooting a mass casualty incident and said families are being notified.
According to the Uvalde Memorial Hospital (UMH), 13 children were transferred to the facility for treatment after an active shooter was reported at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
Two children were also transferred to San Antonio, about 135 kilometres west of Uvalde, and another child is pending transfer.
Law enforcement personnel stand outside Robb Elementary School following a shooting, Tuesday, May 24, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas.
(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)
Two of the individuals who arrived at UMH were deceased, the hospital said in an update online.
“Please refrain from coming to the hospital at this time,” the update read.
Another Hospital, University Health, said it received two patients from the shooting – one child and one adult, a 66-year-old woman in critical condition.
The nature and severity of those injuries wasn’t immediately known, but the shooter was in custody shortly after 1 p.m, the Uvalde Police Department said.
The school has just 575 students in grades 2 to 4.
Earlier, the district said that all schools in the district were locked down because of gunshots in the area.
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A Uvalde Police Department dispatcher said the scene was still active and that no other information was immediately available.
The district said that the city’s civic center will be used as a reunification center and that parents will be able to pick up their children there once everyone is accounted for.
United States president Joe Biden has been briefed on the shooting, according to press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
“His prayers are with the families impacted by this awful event, and he will speak this evening when he arrives back at the White House,” Jean-Pierre said online.
The shooting is the deadliest in Texas since May 18, 2018, when a gunman killed 10 people and wounded 13 others at Santa Fe High School.
It also comes after an 18-year-old gunman killed 10 people and wounded three more at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighbourhood in Buffalo, N.Y. The gunman had posted online that the shooting was racially motivated.
That shooting reanimated the debate around gun control in the United States, with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul pushing new bills to further restrict people deemed dangerous from accessing firearms.
Texas, meanwhile, has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the country. Abbott, a Republican, signed a law last year allowing Texans to carry handguns without a license or training.
In the wake of the 2018 Santa Fe High shooting, Texas lawmakers focused instead on improving school safety, including mandatory emergency training for all school employees and improved mental health care for students.
The law, which passed in 2019, also required school districts to create “threat assessment teams” for every campus as well as “bleeding control stations,” which are essentially battlefield tourniquet kits in schools.
Robb Elementary has a two-page list of preventative safety measures, including a threat assessment team, multiple on-campus police officers, security cameras and metal detectors.
Biden has called on Congress to pass meaningful gun control legislation in the wake of past mass shootings, but action on any restrictions has been routinely blocked by Republicans.
Asked about the push for regulations last week, after he gave a speech condemning the white supremacist ideologies behind the Buffalo shooting, Biden admitted, “It’s going to be very difficult … I’m not going to give up trying.”
Since the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, more than 300,000 children have experienced shootings at 320 schools, according to an investigation by the Washington Post.
Those shootings have led to the deaths of at least 163 children, educators and other people.
The U.S. government does not keep track of school shooting events, leaving most tallies to be done by independent advocacy groups and media reports.
— With files from the Associated Press
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
