Horror in the United States. Fifteen people have been killed – 14 children and a teacher – in a shooting at a Texas elementary school, the state governor announced.
The shooter “killed, in an atrocious and senseless way, 14 students and he killed a teacher”, said Greg Abbott, adding that the 18-year-old suspect was also deceased. The motives of this attack, one of the worst in a school for years, were for the moment unknown.
A woman in “critical condition”
Earlier, Uvalde Memorial Hospital had said on Facebook that it had cared for “13 children”, stating that two people “had died” when they arrived, without indicating their age. A 66-year-old woman is also in “critical condition”, announced another hospital, University Health, located in San Antonio, which says it has received “two patients”, an adult and a child.
The shooting occurred at Robb Elementary School, a town between San Antonio and the Mexican border. More than 500 children were studying at the school during the 2020-2021 school year, according to state data. Ted Cruz, Republican senator from Texas, thanked on Twitter the “heroic police forces” and the emergency services for their intervention during this “horrible shooting”.
“President Joe Biden is kept informed” of the killing, said presidential spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre. “His prayers go out to the families affected by this appalling event and he will speak tonight upon his return to the White House” after his trip to Asia, she added.
Recurring nightmare of school shootings
The attack plunged the country back into the throes of school shootings, which are frequently repeated with shocking images of traumatized students forced to confine themselves to their classrooms before being evacuated by law enforcement and parents panicked, desperate to hear from their children. America was particularly marked by the drama in a high school in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 people, the majority of them teenagers, in 2018.
Shootings in public places are almost daily in the United States and gun crime is on the rise in major cities such as New York, Chicago, Miami or San Francisco, especially since the 2020 pandemic. America has been mourned by a racist shooting that left 10 African Americans dead in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.