At least six people, including the shooter, were hospitalized after a gunman opened fire at a St. Louis high school.
The principal at Central Visual & Performing Arts High School came over the loudspeaker Monday at 9 a.m. and announced the code word for a school shooter, and teachers and students said they heard multiple gunshots as the gunman tried to gain access to classrooms, reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
"Once you heard the boom," said teacher Michael De Filippo, "all the chuckling and laughing in the back of the room stopped."
Ninth-grader Nylah Jones said the shooter fired into her math classroom from the hallway but was unable to get inside, as students piled into a corner and tried not to move as the gunman pounded on the door.
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"You are all going to (expletive) die," the shooter said, according to teacher David Williams, who added that the gunman shot out the window on the door to his classroom.
The gunman was captured inside the school and taken into custody, and he's among those taken to nearby hospitals for injuries ranging from gunshot wounds to cardiac arrest, and one student reported seeing a girl lying on the floor in a hallway between CVPA and Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience.
“What I saw was traumatizing,” said 14-year-old Dakota Willard. “I’m okay, I don’t need any special help.”