10 people killed in
Minn. shootings
8 slain at high school
on Indian reservation;
motive still unknown
The Associated Press
Updated: 9:41 p.m. ET March 21, 2005RED LAKE, Minn. - A student went on a shooting spree Monday, killing seven people at his high school on an Indian reservation, authorities and witnesses said. The gunman himself was found shot to death at the school, and his grandparents were shot dead earlier at their home, the authorities said.
It was the nation’s worst school shooting since the Columbine massacre in 1999.
Before the shootings at Red Lake High School, the suspect’s grandparents were shot in their home and died later.
At least six students were killed, four initially and two who were critically injured then later died. Also slain were a teacher and a security guard, FBI spokesman Paul McCabe said at a news conference in Minneapolis.
Witness accounts
One student described the gunman grinning and waving at a student his gun was pointed at, then swiveling to shoot someone else.
“I looked him in the eye and ran in the room, and that’s when I hid,” Sondra Hegstrom told The Pioneer of Bemidji.
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 shooter. Stately told several media outlets that the grandfather was a police officer whose guns may have been used in the shootings.
Students and a teacher at the scene, Diane Schwanz, said the shooter tried to break down a door to get into a room where some students were.
“I just got on the floor and called the cops,” Schwanz told the Pioneer. “I was still just half-believing it.”
Pleas to end the slaughter
Hegstrom said students pleaded with the gunman to stop shooting. “You could hear a girl saying, ‘No, Jeff, quit, quit. Leave me alone. What are you doing?” Hegstrom said, using the name of the suspected shooter.
Ashley Morrison, another student, took refuge in a classroom. With the shooter banging on the door, she dialed her mother on her cell phone. Her mother, Wendy Morrison, said she could hear gunshots on the line.
“’Mom, he’s trying to get in here, and I’m scared,”’ Ashley Morrison told her mother.
Schwanz was the teacher in that room. She said, “I just got down on the floor and (said), ‘Kids, down on the ground, under the benches!”’ She said she called police on her cell phone.
All of the first five dead students were found in one room. One of them was a boy believed to be the shooter, McCabe said. He would not comment on reports that the boy shot himself and said it was too early to speculate on a motive.
Fourteen to 15 other students were injured, including the two initially listed as critically injured who later died, McCabe said.
The school was evacuated after the shootings and locked down for investigation, McCabe said. “It will probably take us throughout the night to really put the whole picture together,” he said.
Worst since Columbine
It was the nation’s worst school shooting since two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 23 before killing themselves on April 20, 1999.
The last apparent fatal school shootings involving a student also happened in Minnesota in September 2003, when two students were killed at Rocori High School in Cold Spring. Classmate John Jason McLaughlin, who was 15 at the time of the shooting, awaits trial in the case.
That shooting was the first major incident reported since 2001.
Red Lake High School, on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, has about 300 students, according to its Web site.
The reservation is about 240 miles north of the Twin Cities. It is home to the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians.
ho hum, what next?