Police confirmed that an 11-year-old student died and five other people were injured in Thursday's shooting at a secondary school in the town of Perry, Iowa, USA. The shooter was a 17-year-old student at the center who died by his own hand, said Mitch Mortvedt of the Iowa Police Criminal Investigation Division.
The injured include four students and an administrator of the center who were taken to the hospital. One of them is in serious condition, although there is no fear for his life. The condition of the rest is stable.
The event in this city of 8,000, about 45 miles (70 kilometers) from Des Moines, the state capital, began early in the morning as students arrived at the institute for the first day of classes after the Christmas break. The first alert call to emergency services was recorded at 7:37 a.m. local time (2:37 p.m. Spanish Peninsula Time), approximately twenty minutes before the start of the school day, and the first agents arrived at the school seven minutes later.
According to Mortvedt, they found running children trying to escape; others had locked themselves in their classrooms. Almost immediately, they found the shooter's body with a wound that appeared to be self-inflicted. During the search of the school, officers also found an improvised homemade bomb, which they then detonated.
It has not yet been clarified what motive led the student to attack the center with a pistol and a rifle. According to police, the young man acted alone.
Images broadcast by television channels in the hours immediately after the shooting showed a huge deployment of police and fire vehicles around the study center, part of a school pyramid with 1,785 students enrolled. The school district has canceled classes for this Thursday
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The incident occurred a few days before the Republican caucuses in the state to name a candidate for the November presidential election. One of the candidates, Vivek Ramaswamy, had planned to hold a rally in Perry, but after the incident, he changed his program and turned it into an act of prayer.
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