A 15-year-old opened fire for an unknown reason on Tuesday at a high school in the northern United States, killing three students and injuring eight including a teacher, local police said.
The alleged shooter, himself a student at Oxford High School in Michigan, was arrested and did not explain his actions, said Michael McCabe, a county police official. Oakland. “The police arrested the suspect within five minutes of the first call” to the emergency services, he told reporters.
According to authorities in this city north of Detroit, the alert was given at 12:51 p.m. (5:51 p.m. GMT). More than a hundred calls to the 911 emergency number were recorded, as the gunman fired between 15 and 20 times with a semi-automatic handgun within a matter of minutes.
Three students died: a 16 year old boy and two 14 and 17 year old girls. Eight other people, including at least one teacher, were injured and transported to hospitals in the area. Six of them were in stable condition at the end of the day and two more needed surgery, Oakland County police said on their Facebook page.
Present in class on Tuesday, the shooter did not put up any resistance to the agents who arrested him with gun in hand in the establishment which accommodates 1,800 students.
The teenager has remained silent since his arrest. “He is not speaking to us at the moment” on the advice of his parents who “told him not to speak to the police,” said Michael McCabe. The investigation will have to determine whether the author of the shots fired at random or whether he was targeting identified victims, he added.
Massive shootings remain a recurring scourge in the United States, a country where the right to own guns is constitutionally guaranteed. According to statistics from the organization Everytown For Gun Safety, the Oxford shooting bears the heaviest death toll in a school in 2021. So far this year, the country has recorded 138 school shootings, including 26 with one or more two deaths each time.
This year, nearly 41,000 people died by guns in the country, including 22,000 by suicide, according to the organization Gun Violence Archive.