Boy, 14, commits suicide after school shooting
A 14-year-old student opened fire injuring three teenagers and two adults before killing himself at an American high school today, US authorities said.
Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson said two boys, ages 14 and 17, and two men, ages 42 and 57, were injured in the shootings at the SuccessTech Academy in Cleveland, Ohio. A 14-year-old girl fell and hurt her knee while running out of the school.
Witnesses said the gunman threatened students at the school last week and it is believed he was upset after being suspended over fighting.
Mr Jackson said: “The shooter suspect is a 14-year-old student at the school.
“He has committed suicide, as I understand it.”
The mayor said the pupils were in “stable, good condition”, and the adults were in “a little elevated condition”.
Student Doneisha LeVert, who hid in a cupboard with two other students after she heard a “Code Blue” alert over the loudspeaker, said the gunman had threatened students on Friday.
“He’s crazy. He threatened to blow up our school. He threatened to stab everybody,” she said.
Ronnell Jackson, 15, said he saw a boy with a gun running down a school hallway.
“He was about to shoot me, but I got out just in time,” he said. “He was aiming at me.”
Tammy Mundy, 38, who has a son and daughter at the school, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that her daughter called when the shooting started.
“She said, ’Mum they’re shooting in here, kids are running out, I’m hiding in the closet’,” Mrs Mundy told the newspaper.
She said she then called her 18-year-old son, Darnell Rodgers, and he told her he had been shot in the arm.
“He said, ’Mum, I got shot’,” Mrs Mundy said.
Eileen Korey, a spokeswoman for Metro Health Medical Centre, said the 57-year-old, a teacher at the school, was in a good condition and the 17-year-old boy was stable.
She said the conditions of the other patients were not being released.
Students stood outside the building, many in tears, hugging each other and talking on mobile phones.
Others shouted at reporters with TV cameras to leave them alone. Family members also stood outside, anxiously waiting for their children to be released.
The incident comes almost six months after student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and then himself in the shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16.
Today’s shooting occurred across the street from the FBI office in the centre of Cleveland, and students were being sent to the FBI site.
SuccessTech Academy is an alternative high school in the Cleveland city school district that emphasises technology and entrepreneurship.
It is housed on several floors of the district’s central Cleveland Lakeside Avenue administration building.
The school has about 240 mainly black students with a small number of white and Hispanic students. All the students are considered poor under federal poverty guidelines.
The school, which opened five years ago, ranks in the middle of the state’s ratings for student performance. Its graduation rate is 94%, well above the district’s rate of 55%.
