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School shooting shocks US
22/03/2005 07:58 - (SA)
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| Red Lake High School students Sondra Hegstrom, Marla Hegstrom and Ahsley Morrison weep together following a deadly shooting rampage. (Bemidji Pioneer, Molly Miron, AP) |
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Bemidji, Minnesota - A high school student went on a shooting rampage on an Indian reservation, killing his grandparents at their home and then seven people at his school, grinning and waving as he fired, authorities and witnesses said. The suspect apparently killed himself after exchanging gunfire with police.
It was the worst school shooting in the United States since the Columbine massacre in 1999.
One student said her classmates pleaded with the gunman to stop shooting.
"You could hear a girl saying, 'No, Jeff, quit, quit. Leave me alone. What are you doing?" student Sondra Hegstrom told The Pioneer of Bemidji, using the name of the suspected shooter.
Before the shootings on Monday at Red Lake High School, the suspect's grandparents were shot in their home and died later. There was no immediate indication of the gunman's motive.
Shooter was grinning
In addition to the shooter, the death toll at the school included five students, a teacher and a security guard, FBI spokesperson Paul McCabe said in Minneapolis.
McCabe said the gunman first killed a school security officer near the school entrance. Fourteen to 15 other students were injured, McCabe said. Some were being cared for in Bemidji, about 30km south of Red Lake. Authorities closed roads to the reservation in far northern Minnesota while they investigated the shootings.
Hegstrom described the shooter grinning and waving at a student his gun was pointed at, then swivelling to shoot someone else. "I looked him in the eye and ran in the room, and that's when I hid," she told The Pioneer.
McCabe declined to talk about a possible connection between the suspect and the couple killed at the home, but Red Lake Fire Director Roman Stately said they were the grandparents of the gunman. He identified the shooter's grandfather as Daryl Lussier, a longtime officer with the Red Lake Police Department, and said Lussier's guns may have been used in the shootings.
Stately said the shooter had two handguns and a shotgun.
Students and a teacher, Diane Schwanz, said the gunman tried to break down a door to get into her classroom.
"I just got on the floor and called the cops," Schwanz told the Pioneer. "I was still just half-believing it."
Ashley Morrison, another student, had taken refuge in Schwanz's classroom. With the shooter banging on the door, she dialled her mother on her cell phone. Her mother, Wendy Morrison, said she could hear gunshots on the line.
The school was evacuated after the shootings and locked down for the investigation, McCabe said.
"It will probably take us throughout the night to really put the whole picture together," he said.
It was the nation's worst school shooting since two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killed 12 students and a teacher in 1999.
Red Lake reservation is home to the Red Lake Chippewa Tribe, one of the poorest in the state.
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