|
CHICAGO: A black-clad former student turned a university lecture
hall into a Valentine’s Day massacre Thursday, killing five people
and injuring 16 before turning a gun on himself in the fifth US
school shooting in a week, authorities said.
Armed with a shotgun and two handguns, he calmly
stepped out from behind the curtain at the front of an auditorium
just minutes before a geology class ended, officials and witnesses
said.
Screams filled the hall as he sprayed a hail of
bullets from the stage into the auditorium filled with dozens of
students at Northern Illinois University located in a suburb of
Chicago.
“It started and ended within a matter of
seconds,” university police chief Donald Grady said at a press
conference.
Police were in the room within two minutes of
getting the call but did not have time to fire a single shot, as the
gunman was already dead on the stage.
Witnesses described the shooter as a white male
dressed in black around six-foot (1.8 meters) tall, who said nothing
before he began firing.
“He was aiming towards the crowd but I don’t
think he was aiming at a specific person,” a witness named Sheila
told WBBM radio. “He was quiet. He just stood on the stage in
front of everybody and just started shooting.”
“After he fired the first shot, everybody got
down. A lot of people were screaming. Everybody started running for
the door,” another witness, Zach Seward, told CNN. “I turned and
I ran for the door. On my way out, I heard a couple more shots go
off but I wasn’t sure if one was going to hit me in the back so I
ran as fast as I could to my dormitory. It was really a complete
chaos.”
All of those shot were students, including the
instructor who is a graduate student, university president John
Peters said.
Peters also said that the shooter killed four
women and one man, three of whom were dead by the time paramedics
arrived. Six victims remain in critical condition while eight were
discharged within a few hours, hospital officials said.
The shooter was enrolled as a graduate student
in sociology last year and then transferred to another state
institution, officials said.
“The information we have right now indicates
he did not have any record of police contact or a prior arrest
record,” Peters told a press conference.
The massacre follows school shootings in Ohio,
Louisiana, Tennessee and California that left a total of five dead.
It also comes 10 months after a mentally disturbed student at
Virginia Tech University shot down 32 students and faculty in the
deadliest massacre ever at a US school.
Northern Illinois University was placed on a
security alert in December after police found threats on a bathroom
wall laced with racial slurs, references to the Virginia Tech
shooting and a warning that “things will change most hastily” in
the final days of the semester.
-- AFP
|
