Sheriff: Calif. teen planned attack on classmates
Updated at 9:40 p.m. ET
TAFT, Calif. A 16-year-old student armed with a shotgun walked into a rural California high school on Thursday, shot one student and fired at others and missed before a teacher and another staff member talked him into surrendering, officials said.
The teen victim was in critical but stable condition, and the suspect, whose pockets were stuffed with ammunition, was still being interrogated, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said at a news conference Thursday evening.
The suspect used a shotgun that belonged to his brother and went to bed Wednesday night with a plan to shoot two fellow students, Youngblood said.
Surveillance video shows the alleged shooter trying to conceal the gun as he nervously entered Taft Union High School through a side entrance after school had started Thursday morning.
When the shots were fired, teacher Ryan Heber tried to get the more than two dozen students out a back door and engaged the shooter in conversation to distract him, Youngblood said. Campus supervisor Kim Lee Fields responded to a call of shots fired and also began talking to the teen.
"They talked him into putting that shotgun down. He in fact told the teacher, `I don't want to shoot you,' and named the person that he wanted to shoot," Youngblood said.
"The heroics of these two people goes without saying. ... They could have just as easily ... tried to get out of the classroom and left students, and they didn't," the sheriff said. "They knew not to let him leave the classroom with that shotgun."
The shooter didn't show up for first period, then interrupted the class of 28 students.
Youngblood said the suspect alleges the two students he targeted had bullied him for more than a year, but the sheriff couldn't confirm the allegations.
"Certainly he believed that the two people he targeted had bullied him, in his mind. Whether that occurred or not we don't know yet," Youngblood said.
Youngblood did not release the student's disciplinary record, saying he didn't have it.
The shotgun is believed to belong to the boy's brother and was in the boy's home, Youngblood said.
The Sheriff's Department did not release the boy's name because he was a juvenile and had yet to be charged. But many students and community members said they knew the boy and said he was often teased, including Alex Patterson, 18, who went to Taft with the suspect before graduating last year.
"He comes off as the kind of kid who would do something like this," Patterson said. "He talked about it a lot, but nobody thought he would."
Trish Montes, who lived next door to the suspect, said he was "a short guy" and "small" who was teased about his stature by many, including the victim.
"Maybe people will learn not to bully people," Montes said. "I hate to be crappy about it, but that kid was bullying him."
Montes said her son had worked at the school and tutored the boy last year, sometimes walking with him between classes because he felt sorry for him.
"All I ever heard about him was good things from my son," Montes said. "He wasn't Mr. Popularity, but he was a smart kid. It's a shame. My kid said he was like a genius. It's a shame because he could have made something of himself."
The wounded student was flown to a hospital in Bakersfield and was listed in stable but critical condition Thursday evening. Officials said a female student was hospitalized with possible hearing damage because the shotgun was fired close to her ear, and another girl suffered minor injuries during the scramble to flee when she fell over a table.
Officials said there's usually an armed officer on campus, but the person wasn't there because he was snowed in. Taft police officers arrived within 60 seconds of first reports.
Bakersfield television station KERO reported receiving phone calls from people inside the school who hid in closets. About 900 students are enrolled at the high school, which includes ninth through 12th grades.
Wilhelmina Reum, whose daughter Alexis Singleton is a fourth-grader at a nearby elementary school, got word of the attack while she was about 35 miles away in Bakersfield and immediately sped back to Taft.
"I just kept thinking this can't be happening in my little town," she told The Associated Press.
"I was afraid I was going to get hurt," Alexis said. "I just wanted my mom to get here so I could go home."
Taft is a community of fewer than 10,000 people amid oil and natural gas production fields about 120 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
The attack there came less than a month after a gunman massacred 20 children and six women at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., then killed himself.
That shooting prompted President Barack Obama to promise new efforts to curb gun violence. Vice President Joe Biden, who was placed in charge of the initiative, said he would deliver new policy proposals to the president by next week.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said in a statement that her father had attended Taft Union and she has visited the school over the years.
"At this moment my thoughts and prayers are with the victims, and I wish them a speedy recovery," Feinstein said. "But how many more shootings must there be in America before we come to the realization that guns and grievances do not belong together?"
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Get rid of the goshdarned guns. Anything other than this is insanity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvIK4cmzeRY
Convict and imprison this person for a long, long time. One less immature, dangerous, gun-toting coward on the streets, bullied or not.
I just can't go with that.. punishing the effect but not the cause?
Not that I disagree with you.. but i don't think we can progress unless we address the cause and deal with it appropriately..
While I recognize that their brains are not fully developed, they are developed enough to know this level of right from wrong.
Gun crimes should carry long periods of incarceration, in ANY instance where a person is shot and injured (or killed) and it is not justified.
Walter, how about the CCW carrier that stopped the recent Oregon shooter? How about the security guard at the church a few years ago that stopped the active shooter? How about the mother that protected her child the other day? What about the off duty guard that killed the armed robber in Omaha 2 years ago...how many examples do you need to know that guns are not the problem.
Has anyone notice the very glairing similarity in all these shootings? White males, under 25 years in age, lashing out at schools. What can we make of this?
Armed guards make very little difference in school shootings. In the Columbine H. S. attack the armed guards just called for help instead of taking action to prevent students and teachers being killed. After all the difference between most armed and unarmed guards is only about $2 per hour and for such low pay few will risk their own lives. Even the police were extremely slow to respond to the Columbine H. S. assault by a mere two students, which may be why in Colorado it is safer to be a police officer or highway patrol officer than a highway maintenance worker.
Remember too that in general when armed police officers are surprised off duty they rarely even get off one shot against the assailant(s). We need to limit the ammunition available for all guns outside of licensed shooting ranges to less lethal sizes and lethality even if that means it will take more than one shot to bring down a deer, and we need to limit cartridges with more than ten rounds to use and storage only at shooting ranges.
The only true hunting sportmen don't even use guns, they use bows or crossbows, which require more stealth to kill game animals and more technical skill as well.
0 tolerance in schools is part of what causes the problem. if a kid complains he is ignored when he does something to stop it he gets punished along with the guy causing the problem.
Columbine gaurds did as they were trained to do, training can be changed or altered to include taking action along with notifing police. and the pay is a bit higher for an armed guard verses and unarmed one.
limiting ammo to less lethal, good idea that way when you have to defenf yourself you have to shoot them more times and if your are hunting you have more animals not being killed outright but crawling off to die in pain by bleeding to death.
you really are an idiot aren't you.
Support our NRA and stop these school shootings.
Guns like Asbestos come with product Hazard Liability. Not a govt fight. We will settle it via product liability battle like Asbestos Cases.
Affected families should bring law suites on the estate of the shooter and their families and the tool of choice manufacturer. That should get some immediate traction. It is the guns and it is simple.
We don't extend such blanket non-liability to liquor distillers and dealers. A cousin's survivors, as he was killed in the head on collision that disable them, won a lawsuit against the liquor store just down the hill where the accident occured because the store in the name of profit had sold a fresh bottle of liquor to a clearly already drunk driver. His family wound up owning the liquor store plus whatever the store had in liability insurance, and presumably the net worth of the store's owner as well. The family religion prohibits using alcoholic beverages, but owning the liquor store allowed them not just damages but a way to bar drunks fromm buying liquor there through their management practices and employee discipline system. Unfortunately that was something my uncle in his religious zealotry didn't really understand, even though he had come to terms with his brother working in a bar to put himself through college. I understand he finally came around and saw his granddaughter a couple of years before he died from visiting LA for a wedding in his 3rd wife's family and having an asthma attack outside of reach of his inhaler.
you guys just don't have a clue.