Fifteen people, including 14 children, were killed Tuesday when an 18-year-old opened fire at an elementary school in Texas, a tragedy that plunged America back into the recurring nightmare of school shootings.
The suspect, an 18-year-old, killed 14 children and a teacher “in an excruciating and senseless manner” in the town of Uvalde, Republican Governor of Texas Greg Abbott told a press conference .
The alleged shooter also died in the tragedy that hit the township about 130 kilometers west of San Antonio, he added.
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. US President Joe Biden will speak on the shooting Tuesday night, the White House said. “President Biden is kept informed” of the killing, said presidential spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre. “His prayers go out to the families affected by this terrible event and he will speak this evening when he returns to the White House” after his trip to Asia, she added.
Seriously injured woman
A 66-year-old woman is also in “critical condition”, announced another hospital, University Health, located in San Antonio, which says it has received “two patients”, an adult and a child.
The shooting occurred at Robb Elementary School, a town between San Antonio and the Mexican border. More than 500 children were studying at the school during the 2020-2021 school year, according to state data.
Ted Cruz, Republican senator from Texas, thanked on Twitter the “heroic police forces” and the emergency services for their intervention during this “horrible shooting”.
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.
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.