A 15-year-old student opened fire at his Michigan high school on Tuesday, killing three other students and wounding eight other people, authorities say.
Oakland county undersheriff Mike McCabe identified the three students who were killed as a 16-year-old boy and two girls, ages 14 and 17. He said two of the wounded were undergoing surgery as of Tuesday evening and six others were in stable condition. One of the people wounded was a schoolteacher, authorities said.
The suspect’s motives for the attack at Oxford high school in Oxford Township, near Detroit, were not yet known, McCabe said at a news conference.
“A 15-year-old sophomore student of Oxford high school has been taken into custody and the handgun was recovered,” a statement from the sheriff’s office said. “There was no resistance during the arrest and the suspect has asked for a lawyer and has not made any statements as to a motive.”
McCabe said investigators would be looking through social media posts for any evidence of a possible motive. McCabe said the suspect’s parents visited him where he is being held and advised their son not to talk to investigators, as is his right. He said as far as he knew, the suspect had no prior run-ins with law enforcement.
The sheriff’s office said the first call to emergency services was placed at 12.51pm “about an active shooter at Oxford high school”, adding that the dispatch “received over 100 911 calls during the incident”. According to police, the incident unfolded in about five minutes and about 15 to 20 shots were fired.
Oxford Township is a small town of about 22,000 people located roughly 30 miles north of Detroit. More than 100 police officers, including the FBI special agent in charge, and 60 ambulances responded to the incident.
Officers arrested the suspect and recovered a semi-automatic handgun, the sheriff’s office said, adding that it did not think there had been more than one attacker. Authorities did not immediately identify the suspected shooter.
