The suspect, an 18-year-old young man, also died in this tragedy after killing at least 15 people, including a teacher, at a school in Uvalde, between San Antonio and the Mexican border.
Fifteen people, including 14 children, were killed Tuesday when an 18-year-old opened fire at an elementary school in Texas, a tragedy that plunged America back into the recurring nightmare of school shootings. The suspect, an 18-year-old young man, killed 14 children and a teacher “in an atrocious and senseless way” in the town of Uvalde, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott said at a press conference.
Read alsoCalifornia: one dead and four seriously injured in a new shooting in a church
The alleged shooter also died in the tragedy that affected the town located about 130 kilometers west of San Antonio, he added. The motives of this attack, one of the worst in a school for years, were, a few hours after the tragedy, unknown. Earlier, Uvalde Memorial Hospital had said on Facebook that they had taken care of “13 children”specifying that two people “were deceased” when they arrived, without specifying their age.
66-year-old woman seriously injured
A 66-year-old woman was also in a “critical state”announced another hospital, University Health, located in San Antonio, which says it has received “two patients”, an adult and a child. The shooting occurred at Robb Elementary School, a town between San Antonio and the Mexican border. More than 500 children were studying at the school during the 2020-2021 school year, according to state data. Ted Cruz, Republican senator from Texas, thanked the “heroic law enforcement” and emergency services for their intervention during this ‘awful shooting’.
The 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 law enforcement and parents panicked, desperate to hear from their children. 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.
Shootings in public places are 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. America has been mourned by a racist shooting that left 10 African Americans dead in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.