At least 3 dead after St. Louis high school shooting: police

A woman and a teenage girl were killed Monday morning after a gunman opened fire inside a St. Louis high school.

The shooter wounded six others before he was killed by police, authorities said.

The shooting occurred around 9 a.m. at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School. Students reportedly jumped out of windows to escape the building and seek safety. Others barricaded themselves inside classrooms.

One survivor said the shooter’s gun jammed, allowing several people to run away from him and escape.

Police Commissioner Michael Sack offered few details about the shooter at a press conference. He was described as 20 years old but no name was released for him or the victims. Sack did not disclose how the shooter, armed with a long gun, was able to get inside the locked school building.

Witnesses described the shooter as dress in all black and too old to be a student.

Sack said officers stormed the building “without hesitation” before shooting the gunman who was later pronounced dead at a hospital.

“All I heard was two shots and he came in there with a gun,” 16-year-old Taniya Gholston told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “And I was trying to run and I couldn’t run. Me and him made eye contact but I made it out because his gun got jammed. But we saw blood on the floor.”

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Gholston said the shooter complained about the students and the school.

“He said like, ‘I’m tired of this damn school’ and ‘I’m tired of everybody in this damn school,’” she said.

Math teacher David Williams told the Post-Dispatch that the school’s principal spoke a code into the loudspeaker system to alert faculty that an active shooter was in the building and the shooter shouted “you are all going to (expletive) die” after a window on the door of his classroom was shot out.

Some of the injured suffered from gunshot wounds while others were struck by shrapnel.

“Our children shouldn’t have to experience this,” St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones said at a news conference. “They shouldn’t have to go through active shooter drills in case something happens. And unfortunately that happened today.”

This is a developing story.

With News Wire Services