A 15-year-old girl opened fire in a Wisconsin school classroom on Monday, fatally shooting a fellow student and a teacher and wounding six other people before killing herself with the handgun, police said.
The latest school shooting to devastate a US community took place at the Abundant Life Christian School, a private institution that teaches some 400 students from kindergarten through 12th grade in Madison, the state capital of about 270,000 people.
Two students who were wounded in the shooting had life-threatening injuries, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes told a press conference. A teacher and three other students were shot and expected to survive.
The shooter was identified as Natalie Rupnow, who also went by the name Samantha, Barnes said.
A school shooting carried out by a girl remains a rarity, with only about 3% of all US mass shootings perpetrated by females, studies show.
There was as yet no known motive for the violence. The shooter’s family was cooperating with the investigation, police said.
“Today is a sad, sad day, not only for Madison but for our entire country, where yet another police chief is doing a press conference to speak about violence in our community,” Barnes, a former school teacher, told reporters at an earlier press conference.
“Every child, every person in that building, is a victim and will be a victim forever. These types of trauma don’t just go away,” Barnes said.
He said a second-grade student, who would generally be 7 or 8 years old, called 911 to report the shooting at the school.
“Let that soak in for a minute,” Barnes said.
There have been 322 school shootings this year in the US, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database website. That is the second-highest total of any year since 1966, according to that database – topped only by last year’s total of 349 such shootings.
“We need to do better in our country and our community to prevent gun violence,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said.