Guns And A Grudge

A recently expelled student armed with a handgun and a pump-action gun opened fire at his former school in eastern Germany Friday, killing 17 people and then shooting himself. Friday's massacre is believed to be the country's worst shooting violence since the end of World War II, and the worst school shooting ever.

It was the kind of rampage Germans usually associate mainly with the United States.

CBS News Correspondent Richard Roth reports one student's mother said, "We've been Americanized."

Police said the 19-year-old man clad in black killed two girls, 13 teachers, a school secretary and a police officer who had responded to an alert by the school janitor. He then shot himself when German police stormed the school hallways.

Police did not identify the suspected killer, citing the need to shield his family. Police spokesman Rainer Grube said he had been expelled from school, but did not say when. The expulsion apparently deprived the student of his chance to take final exams.

A woman who said she went to school with him said he had once told her "One day, I want everyone to know my name and I want to be famous."

Interviewed on n-tv television, the woman, Isabell Hartung, said the youth often had run-ins with his teachers, though she described him as intelligent and well-liked by schoolmates. She said she believed he had "bad relations with his parents."

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder led German politicians in expressing shock at the worst known school shooting.

"We are stunned in the face of this horrible crime," a grim-faced Schroeder told reporters. "All explanations we could give right now don't go far enough."

Police officials said the dead were found lying in hallways, some in bathrooms. After searching the building, police said they discounted accounts by school students that there was a second gunman.

Members of the police special forces found the gunman dead in a room after combing through the corridors of the school. They said he had shot himself.

The German death toll was higher than at the April 20, 1999 Columbine High School massacre in the United States, where two students killed 13 people and then themselves.

Police who stormed the building after the shooting erupted evacuated about 180 students safely from the Johann Gutenberg high school, located in a residential area of the eastern city of Erfurt.

Police initially said two teachers and a police officer who rushed to the scene were killed by the gunman. Later, police commandos stormed the building and found the other victims.

Police spokesman Manfred Etzel said the gunman fired wildly after entering the school just after 11 a.m. Shooting continued intermittently for about half an hour until police commandos entered the building and the gunman retreated to a classroom.

"We found a horrible scene when we searched the building," he told n-tv television.

Shocked and upset students who fled the shooting reported seeing a man dressed all in black roaming the hallways with a gun.

"I heard shooting and thought it was a joke," said 13-year-old Melanie Steinbrueck, chocking back tears. "But then I saw a teacher dead in the hallway in front of Room 209 and a gunman in black carrying a weapon."

"The guy was dressed all in black — gloves, cap, everything was black," said Juliane Blank, 13. "He must have opened the door without being heard and forced his way into the classroom."

"We ran out into the hallways. We just wanted to get out," she said.

Police said they received a call at 11:05 a.m. from the school janitor, who said someone was shooting in the building. An initial team of officers arrived on the scene shortly after and entered the school. One of the policemen was among those killed.

During the standoff before the gunman shot himself, a handwritten sign reading "HILFE" — Help — was pasted to a fourth-floor window and the face of a girl could be seen through the window in the classroom.

Sixth-grader Martin Streng said he was in math class when he heard gunfire coming from a classroom down the hall. As he and other students filed into the hallway to flee the building, they saw a man with a gun down the corridor behind them, Streng said.

Outside the school, groups of dazed and shocked students huddled in the street hugging and crying as police commandos searched the building.

Some in Germany are saying there's been a climate of aggression growing in the schools that authorities have ignored.

The German teachers union says it wants to keep classrooms from becoming fortresses but that it is time to admit there is a safety problem and the least that is needed may be metal detectors in the nation's schools.

Erfurt, a city of about 200,000 located in former communist East Germany, is generally not considered crime-ridden. The school, housed in a 1908 building, has a high academic reputation. It has 53 teachers and about 700 students in grades five through 12.

It was unclear where the gunman got his weapons. Like most European countries, Germany has tight gun control laws. But there are millions of legal weapons in Germans' homes, registered for use in sport and hunting.

"Whether something like this could have been prevented is an open question," Interior Minister Otto Schily said, adding it appeared the gunman was motivated by hate triggered by his expulsion.

But Schily and other officials expressed concern that Germany may not have taken an increasingly aggressive climate in its schools seriously enough.

Teachers "must confront the challenge of violence" in society, said Ludwig Eckinger, head of a national association of teachers.

It was Germany's second school shooting in two months. In February, a 22-year-old German who recently lost his job shot and killed two former bosses and his old high school's principal in a rampage outside Munich.