History > 2018 > USA > Gun violence (I)

In Texas School Shooting,

10 Dead, 10 Hurt and Many Unsurprised

MAY 18, 2018

The New York Times

By MANNY FERNANDEZ,

RICHARD FAUSSET

and JESS BIDGOOD

SANTA FE, Tex. — A nation plagued by a wrenching loop of mass school shootings watched the latest horror play out in this small Southeast Texas town Friday morning, as a young man armed with a shotgun and a .38 revolver smuggled under his coat opened fire on his high school campus, killing 10 people, many of them his fellow students, and wounding 10 more, the authorities said.

By the end of the day, a 17-year-old suspect, Dimitrios Pagourtzis — an introvert who had given off few warning signs — had surrendered and been taken into custody. Law enforcement officials said they found two homemade explosive devices left at the school during the rampage.

It was the worst school shooting since the February assault on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where a young man with an AR-15 rifle left 17 people dead and prompted a wave of nationwide, student-led protests calling on lawmakers to tighten gun laws.

It was barely after 7:30 a.m. at Santa Fe High School, about 35 miles southeast of Houston, when gunfire first resounded through the halls, the opening volley of yet another massacre at an American high school that would leave students, teachers and staff members shocked, and in some cases bloodied. But they were not necessarily surprised.

A video interview with one student, Paige Curry, spread across social media, an artifact of a moment when children have come to expect violence in their schools.

“Was there a part of you that was like, ‘This isn’t real, this is — this would not happen in my school?’” the reporter asked.

The young girl shook her head: “No, there wasn’t.”

“Why so?” the reporter asked.

“It’s been happening everywhere,” she said. “I felt — I’ve always kind of felt like eventually it was going to happen here, too.”

President Trump, in the East Room of the White House, expressed his solidarity with the people of Santa Fe, and said his administration would do “everything in our power” to protect schools and keep guns away from those who should not have them.

Mr. Trump had also vowed to take action after the Parkland shooting. At the time, the president, a member of the National Rifle Association who has strong political support from gun owners, said he would look at stricter background checks and raising the minimum age for buying an assault weapon, proposals that the group opposes.

He also pressed for an N.R.A.-backed proposal to arm teachers, and said he would favor taking guns away from potentially dangerous people.

But Mr. Trump did not press for action on any of those initiatives, and Congress did not follow through. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on Friday that the Justice Department was proposing to ban so-called bump stocks through regulations rather than wait for Congress to act.

The authorities had not released the names of those who died in the shooting late Friday, but family and associates of some of the victims had begun to share their stories on social media. The family of Cynthia Tisdale, a teacher, said on Facebook that she had been killed in the shooting. And on the Facebook page of the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States expressed condolences for the victims, which he said included a Pakistani exchange student named Sabika Sheikh.

The shooting in Texas began at the start of a school day when summer seemed just around the corner. The night before, seniors had gathered for a sunset dinner and a Powder Puff football game, according to the school’s website, and the baseball team had been playing in the regional quarterfinals.

Zachary Muehe, a sophomore, headed to school thinking about the late work he was supposed to submit before the end of the school year, and settled into his art class to work on a drawing project. He was engrossed in his phone, he said, when his class began to transform into a horror scene.

It started with a boom, and then one or two more. “I turned around and I saw the kid who’s in my football class, I see him every day, and I saw him with a shotgun,” Mr. Muehe said in a phone interview. “I saw him in a trench coat. My immediate thought was just get out.”

It was Mr. Pagourtzis, a youth he recognized as a football teammate who used the locker next to his. “He had one sawed-off shotgun and he had a pistol,” Ms. Muehe said. “He was wearing a trench coat with combat boots. He had a ‘Born to Kill’ shirt on.”

Mr. Pagourtzis, he said, began shooting as soon as he entered the classroom. “It was crazy watching him shoot and then pump,” Mr. Muehe said. “I remember seeing the shrapnel from the tables, whatever he hit, I remember seeing the shrapnel go past my face.”

Mr. Muehe immediately tried to escape. He and his friends went to a back door in the classroom, which leads to a small courtyard, but the door was locked. He then went to a ceramics closet that connects to another art classroom, and as he took one more look at the classroom behind him, he saw students lying on the ground.

“There was a girl on the ground,” Mr. Muehe said, “and he shot her in the head one or two times.” When Mr. Muehe opened the door to the closet, he said, he found students from the next classroom hiding inside. He urged them to run, and began running himself. “I just started running, as fast as I could to the other side of the campus, where I could at least tell someone,” he said.

Kole Dixon, 16, a sophomore, said he was standing outside history class when the fire alarm suddenly went off. He sprinted out a side door, and heard gunshots in rapid succession over the sound of the fire alarm.

When the shooting stopped, Mr. Dixon said that friends told him that the gunman first entered an art classroom, said “Surprise!” and started shooting. The suspect’s ex-girlfriend was among the people shot in that classroom, he said.

Santa Fe is a town where a fear of hurricanes usually outweighs a fear of homicides, and residents seemed shocked by the scene that unfolded. Billie Scheumack, 68, said she saw students from the high school running, scared and clutching their phones, down her street, Tower Road, about a block from the school. A neighbor told her that some children had been shot.

“In this little town, you wouldn’t think something like this could happen,” Ms. Scheumack said.

In a news conference Friday, the authorities released few details of their encounter with Mr. Pagourtzis, but Col. Steven C. McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said that police officers had responded quickly. At one point, Colonel McCraw said, a police chief rescued an officer who had been critically wounded. The TV station KHOU reported that the officer, John Barnes, had been hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the arm.

“We know that because they were willing to run into that building and engage that other lives were saved,” the colonel said.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said two police officers had been on the campus at the time at the attack — as envisioned by the school’s safety plan — and that they were “able to confront the shooter early on in the process.”

The governor said that the suspect had offered few clues that he would carry out a massacre of such scale, although Mr. Abbott did say that the suspect’s Facebook page had included a photograph of a shirt that read “Born to Kill.”

“Unlike Parkland, unlike Sutherland Springs, there were not those types of warning signs,” Mr. Abbott said. “We have what are often categorized as red-flag warnings, and here, the red-flag warnings were either nonexistent or very imperceptible.”

The T-shirt, Mr. Abbott said, appeared to be “maybe the only, if not the foremost, warning sign.” He added that Mr. Pagourtzis had no history of arrests or confrontation with law enforcement.

“His slate is pretty clean,” Mr. Abbott said.

The governor said that the suspect had information about the shooting on his computer and cellphone.

“He said that not only did he want to commit the shooting, but he wanted to commit suicide after the shooting,” Mr. Abbott said, adding that Mr. Pagourtzis had ultimately surrendered and “admitted at the time that he didn’t have the courage to commit the suicide.”

Both weapons appeared to have been taken from the suspect’s father, who is believed to have obtained them legally, Mr. Abbott said.

Investigators intended to question two other people: One was at the scene and had “suspicious reactions,” according to the governor, and another is someone who quickly drew the scrutiny of investigators.

Many answers about who the young man was, and what may have motivated him, remained blurry or fragmented Friday evening. A photo of Mr. Pagourtzis shows a young man with heavy black eyebrows and a backward baseball cap, staring at the camera with lips slightly pursed.

Some images on his Facebook page, now deleted, suggest a possible interest in white supremacist groups, though a direct link to his politics was not evident.

Valerie Martin, a teacher at the junior high school in Santa Fe, had taught Mr. Pagourtzis in her pre-Advanced Placement language arts class. She said he was a bright student — he had taken part in the school’s competition for the National History Contest — and while he was reserved, Ms. Martin had discerned no reason to be concerned about him.

“He was quiet, but he wasn’t quiet in a creepy way,” she said. “He was an introvert, not an extrovert.”

Ms. Martin had also taught Mr. Pagourtzis’s sister; she said she had heard the high school had been hard on her, and that “she was bullied so terribly at the high school that she transferred to Clear Creek,” a school district up the road toward Houston.

But Ms. Martin did not know if the young man had received the same kind of treatment, and said she had seen no signs of bullying toward either of them when she had taught them.

Some students at Santa Fe High School had taken part in a protest after the Parkland shooting.

On a cold Friday morning last month — the day of the National School Walkout — Kyle Harris and 11 other students had stood outside Santa Fe High hoping to spread their gun control message to their classmates.

One of them held a poster: “Santa Fe High School says #NeverAgain.” They read a poem by a survivor of the Parkland shooting, an event that was searing to them, but far away.

“Being part of that gathering was me telling people to stand up for themselves,” said Mr. Harris, who is in 10th grade.

One month later, the family of Sarah Salazar, a sophomore at Santa Fe High, held an anxious vigil at a Texas hospital, where Ms. Salazar was in surgery after being shot several times.

Rosemary Salazar, Sarah’s aunt, said that she was in art class when the shooting occurred. Doctors were working to repair wounds to her stomach, her thigh and her shoulder, which was severely damaged.

“They said that her left shoulder is pretty much gone,” Ms. Salazar said. “She’ll have to undergo a lot more surgery.”

The family had spent 90 minutes calling and texting Sarah — and receiving no response — before finding out that she had been shot.

Word of the shooting also spread its pain to Stoneman Douglas High. Kaitlyn Jesionowski, a student there, first saw the news on Twitter on what was the last day of school for seniors. It all came rushing back: the fear, the anxiety, the stress.

“I started replaying what happened to us in my head,” she said. “Over and over.”

Manny Fernandez reported from Santa Fe, Tex., Richard Fausset from Atlanta and Jess Bidgood from Boston. Reporting was contributed by Roxanna Asgarian from Santa Fe, Tex.; Dave Montgomery from Dallas; Alan Blinder from Atlanta; Niraj Chokshi, Matthew Haag, Amy Harmon
and John Schwartz from New York; Julie Hirschfeld Davis
from Washington; and Julie Bosman from Chicago.

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A version of this article appears in print on May 19, 2018,
on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
10 Dead in Shooting at Texas High School.

In Texas School Shooting, 10 Dead, 10 Hurt and Many Unsurprised,
NYT,
May 18, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18
/us/school-shooting-santa-fe-texas.html

Death Toll Is at 17

and Could Rise in Shooting

 

FEB. 14, 2018

The New York Times

By AUDRA D. S. BURCH

and PATRICIA MAZZEI

PARKLAND, Fla. — A heavily armed young man barged into his former high school about an hour northwest of Miami on Wednesday, opening fire on terrified students and teachers and leaving a death toll of 17 that could rise even higher, the authorities said.

Students huddled in horror in their classrooms, with some of them training their cellphones on the carnage, capturing sprawled bodies, screams and gunfire that began with a few shots and then continued with more and more. The dead included students and adults, some of whom were shot outside the school and others inside the sprawling three-story building.

The gunman, armed with a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle, was identified as Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old who had been expelled from the school, the authorities said. He began his shooting rampage outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in this suburban neighborhood shortly before dismissal time around 2:40 p.m. He then made his way inside and proceeded down hallways he knew well, firing at students and teachers who were scurrying for cover, the authorities said.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” one student yelled over and over in one video circulating on social media, as more than 40 gunshots boomed in the background.

By the end of the rampage, Mr. Cruz had killed 12 people inside the school and three outside it, including someone standing on a street corner, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said. Two more victims died of their injuries in local hospitals. The aftermath at the school was an eerie shrine, with chairs upended, a computer screen shattered with bullet holes and floors stained with blood.

On Thursday, the authorities charged Mr. Cruz with 17 counts of premeditated murder.

“This is catastrophic,” said Sheriff Israel, who has three children who graduated from the high school. “There really are no words.”

Mr. Cruz was arrested in Coral Springs, a neighboring city a couple of miles from the school, about an hour after fleeing the scene, the authorities said. He had slipped out of the building by mixing in with crowds of students. In addition to the rifle, Sheriff Israel said Mr. Cruz had “countless magazines.”

The gunman had clearly prepared for the attack, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said in an interview after speaking to the F.B.I.

“The shooter wore a gas mask, had smoke grenades, and he set off the fire alarm so the kids would come out of the classrooms,” said Mr. Nelson, citing details he learned from the F.B.I. Several students said they found it strange to hear the alarm, because they had already had a fire drill earlier in the day.

Sheriff Israel said he did not know the gunman’s motive. He said a football coach was among the dead, and the son of a deputy sheriff among the injured. Twelve of the 17 dead had been identified by Wednesday night, he added, noting that not all of the students had backpacks or wallets on them.

Mr. Cruz was enrolled at another Broward County school, officials said. Sheriff Israel said law enforcement officials had already discovered material on Mr. Cruz’s social media accounts that was “very, very disturbing.”

Jim Gard, a math teacher at the school, said Mr. Cruz was in his class in 2016 and appeared to be a “quiet” student. But Mr. Gard also recalled that “there was concern” about his behavior on the part of the school administration, which emailed teachers relaying those fears.

Mr. Gard said that after the shooting, he learned from several students that Mr. Cruz was obsessed with a girl at the school to the point of “stalking her,” a point the authorities did not raise in news briefings near the scene.

The massacre called to mind the country’s two mass shootings that have come to be known by the name of the schools: Columbine, the high school outside Denver where 12 students and a teacher were killed in 1999; and Sandy Hook, the elementary school in Newtown, Conn., where 20 students and six adults were shot dead in 2012.

More than 40 “active shooter” episodes in schools have been recorded in the United States since 2000, according to F.B.I. and news reports. Two 15-year-old students were killed and 18 more people were injured last month in a school in rural Benton, Ky. The shootings have become common enough that many schools, including Stoneman Douglas High, run annual drills in which students practice huddling in classrooms behind locked doors.

With the Parkland shooting, three of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern United States history have come in the last five months.

Mr. Nelson said the episode made him relive recent shootings that also shook the state. “Forty-nine slaughtered at the Pulse nightclub. Another handful slaughtered at the Fort Lauderdale airport, just a year ago, in the same county where this took place,” he said. “And that’s just Florida.”

After the gunfire had stopped Wednesday afternoon and Mr. Cruz had fled, students ran out of the school, some in single file with their hands on the shoulders of those in front of them and others in all-out sprints. As the students sought cover, law enforcement officers armed with military-grade weapons swarmed the building. Parents rushed to a local Marriott hotel to reunite with their children.

“I tried to stay calm. Students were running everywhere,” said Dianna Milleret, a 16-year-old sophomore who heard the gunshots.

Noelle Kaiser, 17, was in history class when a fire alarm went off. The class was gathered just outside the building when she heard three distinct gunshots.

“I am in shock,” she said softly after clutching her mother, Cheryl Kaiser, on the sidewalk outside the school.

Seventeen patients were treated in three area hospitals, including two who died, said Dr. Evan Boyar of the Broward Health System. All suffered gunshot wounds.

“Words cannot express the sorrow that we feel,” said Robert W. Runcie, the Broward schools superintendent. “No parent should ever have to send their kid to school and have them not return.”

Parkland, an affluent suburb of Fort Lauderdale with a population of about 30,000, is known for its good public schools. Stoneman Douglas High is among the largest in the Broward school district, with about 3,000 students. The school will remain closed for the rest of the week. Gov. Rick Scott directed the state to lower its flags at half-staff until Monday.

“My prayers and condolences to the families of the victims of the terrible Florida shooting,” President Trump wrote on Twitter. “No child, teacher or anyone else should ever feel unsafe in an American school.”

As the authorities frantically searched for the person responsible, they asked residents of the city to avoid the area around the school.

For hours, parents were lined along Coral Springs Drive, calling their children on cellphones and pacing. Some parents said their children told them only to text to not make noise. One parent of two daughters at a nearby middle school said he sat in a bank lobby near the school and prayed.

The gunfire came as some students were still staring at chalkboards and listening to lectures.

Rebecca Bogart, 17, a senior, said her teacher was finishing up a discussion of the Holocaust when she heard a series of loud bangs.

“We all got on the floor and under the desk,” said Ms. Bogart, who was still shaking outside the school. “It felt like we were there 10 or 15 minutes and then shots came through the window and the glass shattered.”

She couldn’t see her classmates fall, but she could see at least five were bleeding, one in the head and one in the leg. “I was trying to keep calm and my friend was holding my hand to keep it from shaking,” she said.

When the authorities arrived, they took out her wounded classmates first. “There was blood all over the floor,” she said, “You never think something like this is going to happen to you and then it does.”

Audra D.S. Burch reported from Parkland, and Patricia Mazzei from New York. Reporting was contributed by Neil Reisner from Parkland; Maggie Astor, C.J. Chivers, Niraj Chokshi, Matthew Haag, Serge Kovaleski, Matt Stevens and Daniel Victor from New York; and Adam Goldman from Washington. Doris Burke contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on February 15, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Horror at Florida School; Ex-Student Held.

Death Toll Is at 17 and Could Rise in Shooting,
NYT,
Feb. 14, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/14/us/parkland-school-shooting.html