Associated Press
RED LAKE, Minn. (AP) -- Six people died Monday in a shooting spree apparently carried out by a student at Red Lake High School, the FBI said. The same student was suspected in the killings of two people at a home before the school shootings.
Those dead at the school were four students, among them the suspected shooter, along with a teacher and a security guard, FBI spokesman Paul McCabe said at a news conference in Minneapolis.
Before the shootings, a man and a woman were fatally shot at a home in Red Lake, McCabe said.
The suspect was a male student, McCabe said. He would not comment on reports that the boy shot himself. He also declined to talk about a possible connection between the suspect and the couple killed at the home but the Red Lake fire director Roman Statley said they were the grandparents of the shooter. Stateley told several media outlets that the grandfather was a police officer whose guns may have been used in the shootings.
Fourteen to 15 more students were injured, including two critically. All of the dead students -- two boys and two girls -- were in one room, McCabe said.
The school was evacuated after the shootings, which happened about 3 p.m., and was locked down for investigation, McCabe said.
“It will probably take us throughout the night to really put the whole picture together,” McCabe said. He said it was too early to speculate on a motive.
Diane Schwanz, a teacher, told The Pioneer of Bemidji that the shooter tried to break down a door to get into a room where some students were.
I just got on the floor and called the cops,” Schwanz said. “I was still just half-believing it.”
Four victims were being treated at North Country Regional Hospital in Bemidji, said Sherri Birkeland, the hospital’s vice president of development and planning. She had no specific information on the victims or the shooting.
Other victims were expected at MeritCare Hospital in Fargo, N.D., said an administrator who declined to give her name.
The Red Lake Indian Reservation is in far northern Minnesota, about 240 miles north of the Twin Cities, and about 75 miles south of the Canadian border.
It was the second major school shooting in Minnesota in recent years. In September 2003, two students were shot at Rocori High School in central Minnesota.
Aaron Rollins, 17, and Seth Bartell, 14, both died from their wounds -- Rollins that day and Bartell 16 days later. Fellow student John Jason McLaughlin, 15 at the time of the shootings, awaits trial in the case.