No motive as teen kills his father in shooting spree at Townville
A teenager shot and wounded two children and a teacher at an elementary school in South Carolina, before being taken into custody on Wednesday, police said at a news conference.
The shooting happened early in the afternoon at Townville Elementary School in Anderson County, located near the Georgia state line about 100 miles (160 km) northeast of Atlanta.
The circumstances of the shooting are not known but a dead body was found on a dirt road near the school, the local coroner told CBS News.
The two injured students were airlifted to the hospital and the teacher was driven by ambulance, police said. Other students were loaded onto busses and evacuated to a nearby church, local media said.
One child was flown to Greenville Memorial Hospital’s emergency trauma center, health system spokeswoman Sandy Dees said. Further details were not immediately available.
Reuters could not immediately reach the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office for comment.
About 280 students attend the school and 64 percent receive subsidized lunches, according to online real estate database company Zillow.
South Carolina Gov. Nickki Halley issued the following statement:
“As we work together with law enforcement to make sure they have the support they need to investigate what happened in Townville, Michael and I ask that everyone across South Carolina join us in praying for the entire Townville Elementary School family and those touched by today’s tragedy.”
The school is closed for the rest of the week.
The United States has long been plagued by shootings at schools and colleges, some of which have claimed dozens of lives. In 2012, a gunman shot dead 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The deadliest mass school shooting was in 2007, when a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University.
Earlier this month, a 14-year-old girl shot and wounded a fellow student at a rural Texas high school and then died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
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