(TheRedAlertNews.com) – Two victims and the shooter have perished in a school shooting in St. Louis, Missouri. The shooter was identified as a 19-year-old former student who graduated from the same institution last year.
Monday morning’s mass shooting in the Central Visual and Performing Arts High School in St. Louis caused the deaths of a 16-year-old girl and a 61-year-old woman.
The shooter killed the girl, Alexis Bell, on the spot, while physical education teacher Jean Kirk Kuczka passed away from her wounds in a local hospital shortly after the incident, Fox 3 Now reported.
The suspect – identified by the police as Central VPA High School alum Orlando Harris, 19 – also died of gunshot wounds in the hospital.
Lieutenant Colonel Michael Sack, the interim chief of the St. Louis Police Department, announced Harris graduated in 2021 and had no criminal history.
When the police officers took him down, Harris had a long gun with 12 magazines.
Seven more individuals were wounded in the shooting, all 15- and 16-year-old students. They have been hospitalized with gunshot and shrapnel wounds.
Three of them have suffered direct gunshot wounds, two have abrasions, one is with a graze wound, and one with an ankle fracture.
Chief Sack was able to offer little additional details about the shooter. However, he said the police had recovered evidence from the car that Harris used to go to CVPA.
The chief said the investigators are working on figuring out the former student’s motives and where he had been precisely before arriving at the school.
Police officers were sent to the scene on Monday at 9:10 am local time, arriving minutes after receiving reports.
“For all of us, today is a painful day. It will be difficult. While it appears that there were nine victims, eight were transported, and one was left behind, there are actually hundreds more. Everyone who made it through this will go home traumatized,” the police chief said.
The mass shooting was over in less than an hour after, at 10:05 am, the FBI stated that “there is no longer an immediate threat at the high school.”
“You’ll all fucking die,” the 19-year-old shooter started shouting when he opened fire, according to reports.
“He shot the teacher first. She fell to the ground. Another boy was shot in the hand and was bleeding. Two more girls were killed,” student Keyshawn Brooks told KSDK-TV.
“When he left the room, we opened the window and jumped out,” the student said.
Authorities told the killed teacher’s daughter, Abigail Kuczka Mail, that her mother stood before the shooter to try to protect her students.
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Orlando Harris, 19, has been named as the suspect in a shooting at Central VPA High School in St. Louis. Harris and two others, a teacher Jean Kirk Kuczka and a teen girl Alexis Bell, are dead.— Fox3 Now (@fox3news) October 24, 2022
