- TABER, Alberta (Reuters) - One high school student was dead and another
was undergoing surgery after a shooting at a school in this western Canadian
town on Wednesday, hospital authorities said.
-
- Police have taken one person into custody,
according to media reports. The victims were sent to a hospital in nearby
Lethbridge, Alberta.
-
- The shooting occurred around lunchtime
at W.R. Myers High School in Taber, a sleepy farming community of 7,200
people located roughly 175 kilometers (109 miles) southeast of Calgary,
Alberta.
-
- Witnesses said the school of about 400
students was ringed in yellow crime-scene tape and surrounded by emergency
vehicles. No one was allowed in or out of the building.
-
- Students said the school will be shut
Thursday and Friday.
-
- Matt Anderson, a grade 10 student at
the school, said the two students who were shot were in grade 11 and the
boy in custody was a ninth-grade student who was receiving home schooling
after dropping out.
-
- Police were not immediately releasing
details.
-
- "One of my teachers came in and
told us that no one was to leave the classroom for any reason, and they
locked all the doors so nobody could get in. And then I heard an ambulance,"
said grade 11 student Kristen White, who added that she was friends with
the injured boys.
-
- "I was very afraid. I didn't know
what was going on," she said.
-
- White said three people were targeted
by the shooter but only two were wounded.
-
- "My friends didn't know (the shooter)
because there were three people that were shot at and one of them didn't
get shot, he told me that he never met ... the guy who did it," she
said.
-
- The incident comes just eight days after
two high school students launched a gun-and-bomb attack at Columbine High
School in Littleton, Colorado, killing 12 fellow students and a teacher
before taking their own lives. Twenty others were injured and nine of those
were still hospitalized Wednesday.
-
- The Columbine massacre was the bloodiest
school shooting ever in the United States. Threats of bomb and gun violence
have plagued North American schools in the past week.
-
- White said she and her friends discussed
the Columbine massacre often in the past week.
-
- "We just thought it was kind of
stupid that somebody would do something like that, come into a school,
and I never would have thought it would have happened here in such a small
town."
|
