By Bill Barrow
Associated Press
DECATUR, Ga. — A teen opened fire with an assault rifle Tuesday at officers who shot back at an Atlanta-area elementary school, the police chief said, with dramatic overhead television footage capturing the young students racing out of the building, being escorted by teachers and police to safety. No one was injured.
Just a week into the new school year, more than 800 students in pre-kindergarten to fifth grade were evacuated from Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, a few miles (kilometers) east of Atlanta. They sat outside along a fence in a field for a time until school buses came to take them to their waiting parents and other relatives at a nearby Wal-Mart. When the first bus arrived about three hours after the shooting, cheers erupted in the store parking lot.
The suspect, a 19-year-old with no clear ties to the school, fired at least a half-dozen shots from inside McNair, the chief said. Officers returned fire when the man was alone and they had a clear shot, DeKalb County Police Chief Cedric L. Alexander said at a news conference. The suspect surrendered shortly after and he had other weapons, Alexander said. Police had no motive.
Though the school has a system where people must be buzzed in by staff, the gunman may have slipped inside behind someone authorized to be there, Alexander said. The suspect, whose identity was not released, never got past the front office, where he held one or two employees captive for a time, the chief said. The man was being questioned and no charges had been filed as of early evening.
A woman in the school office called WSB-TV as it was happening to say the gunman asked her to contact the Atlanta station and police. WSB said during the call, shots were heard in the background. Assignment editor Lacey Lecroy said she spoke with the woman who said she was alone with the man and his gun was visible.
“It didn’t take long to know that this woman was serious,” Lecroy said. “Shots were one of the last things I heard. I was so worried for her.”
Complicating the rescue, bomb-sniffing dogs alerted officers to something in the suspect’s trunk and investigators believe the man may have been carrying explosives, Alexander said. Officials cut a hole in a fence to make sure students running from the building could get even farther away to a nearby street, he said.
Police had strung yellow tape up blocking intersections near the school while children waited to be taken to Wal-Mart where hundreds of people were anticipating their arrival. The crowd waved from behind yellow police tape as buses packed with children started pulling up along the road at the store. The smiling children waved back.
The school has about 870 children enrolled. The academy is named after McNair, an astronaut who died when the space shuttle Challenger exploded on Jan. 28, 1986, according to the school’s website.
Jonessia White, the mother of a kindergartner, said the school’s doors are normally locked.
“I took (my son) to school this morning and had to be buzzed in,” she said. “So I’m wondering how the guy got in the door.”
Since shootings in classrooms all over America, the massacre at Connecticut’s Newtown Elementary being the freshest in people’s minds, schools have implemented security from metal detectors to armed guards. McNair had its own safety precautions.
White said the school has a set of double doors where visitors must be buzzed in and show identification to a camera to be allowed in.
“I don’t know how this could happen at this school,” Zamora said. “There’s so much security.”
Copyright 2013 Associated Press