Police respond to active shooting alert
About ten people were killed in a shooting Friday morning at a high school in Southeast Texas, police said, and a student was taken into custody amid the carnage.
The Washington Post reported Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez as saying there were between 8 and 10 people killed, most of them students at Santa Fe High School in Galveston County, south of Houston. Some faculty members were also killed in the shooting, which occurred before 8 a.m., he said.
Gonzalez said one male student was taken into custody, and he said a second person — another student described as “a person of interest” — was being detained and questioned.
The gunfire in Santa Fe was the latest eruption of gun violence to terrorize students and teachers alike, and it came just three months after a gunman in Parkland, Fla., killed 17 students and staff members at a high school there.
Gonzalez said authorities were still searching the campus to make sure there were no other people hidden, and he warned they could still find other people injured or killed. He warned that the death toll could shift.
Witnesses described panic and confusion as the shots were fired. Students in an art room fled as a gunman came inside, and someone pulled a fire alarm at some point Friday morning.
“Everybody took off,” student Tyler Turner told ABC-13 in Houston. “I heard three shots.”
Turner said that after he was out of harm’s way, he called his mother and then he heard four more shots.
The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston said it had received at least three patients wounded in the incident.
At a press conference, Raul Reyes, a spokesman for the hospital, said all three had gunshot wounds, including one middle-aged man who was rushed immediately into surgery in critical condition with chest injuries.
The president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, Joseph Gamaldi, said an office had been shot and taken to an area hospital via helicopter.
Gamaldi said the injured officer is a Santa Fe Independent School District Police officer who had retired from the Houston police. In a telephone interview, Gamaldi said he did not have any information on the officer’s condition.
Television footage showed students walking away from the main school building under the watch of law enforcement officers. Ambulances were on the scene, as well as Life Flight helicopters.
