Nevada :A student armed with a semi-automatic handgun killed a math teacher and critically wounded two classmates before killing himself at his Nevada middle school on Monday, law enforcement officials said.
Witnesses described a chaotic scene at the school in the northwestern Nevada town of Sparks, just east of Reno near the California border, after the gunfire erupted outside classrooms as students were arriving for the school day.
“A kid started getting mad and he pulled out a gun and shoots my friend, one of my friends at least,” a seventh-grade student identified as Andrew Thompson told local television station KOLO.”And then he walked up to a teacher and says back up. The teacher started backing up and he pulled the trigger.”
“The teacher was just lying there and he was limp,” he told KOLO. “And me and five other friends went to him and said ‘come on, we’ve got to get him to safety.” We picked him up, carried him a little bit far and we left him because our vice principal came along and said ‘go, go, go, get to safety, get to safety.” So we left the teacher there and we went to safety.”
The incident was the latest in a string of shooting rampages across the United States in recent years, including one in December at a Connecticut elementary school that killed 20 students and six adults and helped reignite a national debate over gun control.
The slain educator at Sparks Middle School was identified by his family as 45-year-old math teacher Michael Landsberry.
