Mar. 22, 2005. 07:59 AM
MOLLY MIRON/AP
Red Lake School District Superintendent Stuart Desjarlait comforts a teacher yesterday following a deadly shooting at Red Lake High School. Witnesses described the gunman as grinning and waving as he pointed his gun. Officials said nine died before the student turned the gun on himself.
Student's rampage leaves 10 dead
Gunman kills grandparents, 7 others
Shooter then turns gun on himself
JOSHUA FREED
ASSOCIATED PRESS
RED LAKE, Minn.—A high school student went on a shooting rampage on this Indian reservation yesterday, killing nine people before turning the gun on himself.
The shooter killed his grandparents at their home before shooting seven people at his school, "grinning and waving" as he fired, authorities and witnesses said.
It was the United States's worst school shooting since the Littleton, Colo., massacre at Columbine in 1999.
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?" Sondra Hegstrom told The Pioneer of Bemidji, using the name of the suspected shooter.
Fourteen to 15 other students were injured, said FBI spokesperson Paul McCabe.
Some were being cared for in Bemidji, about 30 kilometres south of Red Lake. Authorities closed the reservation while they investigate the shootings.
Before the shootings at Red Lake High School, the suspect's grandparents were shot in their home and died later.
Six students including the gunman were killed at the school, along with a teacher and a security guard, McCabe said at a Minneapolis news conference.
Hegstrom described the gunman grinning, waving and pointing his gun at a student, 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 their home.
But Red Lake fire director Roman Stately said the couple were the gunman's grandparents. He identified one of them as Daryl Lussier, a long-time 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.
"After he shot a security guard, he walked down the hallway shooting and went into a classroom where he shot a teacher and more students," Stately told Minneapolis television station KARE.
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.''
Ashley Morrison, another student, took refuge in a classroom as the shooter banged on the door. She called her mother, on her cell phone.
"Mom, he's trying to get in here and I'm scared," 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!'" All of the 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.
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.
It was the nation's worst school shooting since two students at Columbine High School 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 in far northern Minnesota, has about 300 students, according to its website.
The reservation, home to the Red Lake Chippewa Tribe, is about 380 kilometres north of the Twin Cities and 120 kilometres south of the Canadian border.
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