At least 21 people killed including 18 students in Texas school shooting – rts.ch

At least 21 people – including 18 students – were killed and more than a dozen others injured in a shooting at a Texas school on Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott said. The shooter, an 18-year-old boy, also died.

The suspect, an 18-year-old young man, killed at least 21 people, including 18 children and at least one teacher, “in an excruciating and senseless manner” in the town of Uvalde, the Republican governor of Texas says Greg Abbott at a press conference. The alleged shooter also died in this tragedy which affected the town located about 130 kilometers west of San Antonio.

A previous toll reported 14 children and one adult killed.

The shooter would have first targeted his grandmother, whose state of health remained to be clarified, before going to school and “abandoning his car” to enter the building with “a handgun” and possibly “a rifle”, according to the governor. The motives of this attack, one of the worst in a school for years, were for the moment unknown.

Earlier, Uvalde Memorial Hospital had said on Facebook that it had cared for “13 children”, adding that two people “had died” when they arrived, without specifying their ages. A 66-year-old woman is also in “critical condition,” said University Health Hospital, located in San Antonio, which says it has received “two patients”, an adult and a child.

The shooting occurred at Robb Primary School, which serves children aged 5 to 7 in Uvalde. More than 500 children, nearly 90% of whom are Hispanic, were studying at the school during the 2020-2021 school year, according to state data. Videos shared on social media showed children being evacuated urgently, running in small groups towards yellow school buses.

Frequent shootings

The attack plunged the country back into the throes of school shootings, which are frequently repeated with shocking images of traumatized students forced to confine themselves to their classrooms before being evacuated by law enforcement and parents panicked, desperate to hear from their children.

America was particularly marked by the drama in a high school in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 people, the majority of them teenagers, in 2018.

>> Read again: At least 17 dead in Florida school shooting

Shootings in public places are almost daily in the United States and gun crime is on the rise in major cities such as New York, Chicago, Miami or San Francisco, especially since the 2020 pandemic.

In mid-May, America was bereaved by a racist shooting that killed 10 African-Americans in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.

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