Published on : 24/05/2022 – 23:20
Fifteen people, including fourteen students and a teacher, were killed in a shooting on Tuesday at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, reports state governor Greg Abbott. The suspect, an 18-year-old boy, also died.
A new shooting comes to mourn the United States. At least fifteen people were killed by an armed teenager at a primary school in Uvalde, Texas, State Governor Greg Abbott announced Tuesday, May 24. The shooter “killed, in an atrocious and senseless way, fourteen students and he killed a teacher,” he said at a press conference.
Texans are grieving for the victims of this senseless crime & for the community of Uvalde.
Cecilia & I mourn this horrific loss & urge all Texans to come together.
I’ve instructed @TxDPS & Texas Rangers to work with local law enforcement to fully investigate this crime. pic.twitter.com/Yjwi8tDT1v
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) May 24, 2022
Two people, a 10-year-old girl and a 66-year-old woman, are still in “critical condition,” University Health Hospital in San Antonio said.
The 18-year-old suspect also died. “It appears the responding officers killed him,” Greg Abbott said.
The assailant 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, are for the moment unknown.
This drama hit Robb Elementary School in the town of Uvalde, located about 130 kilometers west of San Antonio. More than 500 children between the ages of 5 and 7, nearly 90 percent of whom are Hispanic, were studying at the facility during the 2020-2021 school year, according to state data.
Flags lowered
US President Joe Biden will speak on Tuesday evening after returning from his trip to Asia, the White House announced. “His prayers go out to the families hit by this appalling event,” added presidential spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre.
The White House has also ordered flags to be half-masted in all public buildings to “honor the victims” of Uvalde.
For his part, 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 drama recalls that of Sandy Hook Elementary Schoolin Connecticut, where a 20-year-old maniac had killed 26 people, including twenty children aged 6 and 7, before committing suicide.
Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from that state, “begged” his elected colleagues to act, assuring that these tragedies were not “inevitable”. “It only happens in this country, and nowhere else. In no other country do children go to school thinking they might get shot.”
Recurring shootings
This 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 the police.
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.
The shootings in public places is 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. Mid-May, America was bereaved by a racist shooting that left ten African Americans dead in a Buffalo supermarketin New York State.
With AFP