At least one student was killed and four others were injured in a shooting incident at the Chardon High School in the U.S. state of Ohio on Monday, reports quoting officials said.
The incident reportedly happened at the school cafeteria during the busy breakfast time. The suspected gunman, who fled the scene immediately after the incident, is currently under police custody.
"I am happy to tell you that the student that did the shooting is captured. He actually turned himself in to a couple of innocent bystanders just north of the city here in Chardon township," a spokesman from the sheriff's office told reporters at the scene.
The spokesman said the suspect could not be identified as he was a juvenile. But local media quoted some witnesses as saying they recognized the assailant as T.J. Lane, who they said was an outcast. But his identity is yet to be confirmed by authorities.
U.S. media quoted witnesses as saying that the gunman appeared to target a group of students sitting together at the cafeteria. The student killed in the incident has been identified as Daniel Parmertor, who was waiting at the eatery for a bus to a vocational school when the shooting took place.
The injured were rushed to nearby hospitals. While two of the injured were reported to be critical, the condition of a third was said to be serious.
Chardon High School has about 1,100 students and is in Chardon, a small town of about 5,000 residents some 30 miles east of the city of Cleveland. A vigil has been scheduled for Tuesday evening for the victims of the shooting incident. Also, all schools in the town will remain closed on Tuesday.
This is not the first time that a school in the United States has witnessed such a shooting incidents. It came just three months after two people were killed in a shooting at the Virginia Tech university in the state of Virginia last December. One of the dead in that incident was police-army veteran Deriek Crouse, while the other was the shooter himself.
Virginia Tech was the scene of the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history in April 2007, when a mentally-deranged South Korean student named Seung-Hui Cho, 23, gunned down 32 people before killing himself. Prior to that, at least 12 students and a teacher were killed in a similar shooting incident at the Columbine High School in Colorado in April 1999.
by RTT Staff Writer
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