Los Angeles Times
ERFURT, Germany – A 19-year-old angered by his expulsion burst into a high school Friday carrying a pump-action shotgun and a revolver and shot to death 15 adults and two students before killing himself.
The attack evoked the nightmare images of the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado three years ago. Tearful parents ran toward the Johann Gutenberg secondary school in search of their children, and paramedics crouched along sidewalks and cobblestone streets to tend to the wounded.
The killing spree sent shock waves across a nation that has long considered itself far less vulnerable to the violence that has afflicted U.S. campuses.
The shootings, which left 14 school employees, a policewoman, two girls and the gunman dead and at least six wounded, also caused public soul-searching about what compels a distressed youth to turn violent and what society might to do prevent such horrors.
Interior Minister Otto Schily termed it “a macabre coincidence” that the shooting came on a day the government managed to push through a bill in Parliament that would impose tighter controls on gun ownership and harsher penalties for illegal possession.
Witnesses said the masked gunman clad in black shot two school employees in the building foyer and then prowled the corridors, occasionally opening a classroom door and firing at the teacher.
Police who stormed the school after he barricaded himself in a classroom described the scene as the most gruesome they had ever witnessed. There was “blood everywhere, bodies in the hallways, in the classrooms, in the bathrooms,” Erfurt Police Chief Rainer Grube told reporters.
The deadly drama began shortly after 11 a.m. when a janitor at the school called police after hearing the first shots. After a policewoman, 42, who was among the first officers at the scene was killed, a special commando unit was sent in to conduct a room-to-room search for the youth.
The gunman is believed to have shot himself early on in the confrontation. But students and teachers on the upper floors – apparently fearful of encountering him if they tried to leave – were trapped in their classrooms for hours before police made their way though the massive five-story building.
Fellow students described the gunman, whose identity was not released Friday, as upset by his expulsion early this year and the refusal of school administrators to let him take exams required for university entrance.
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