A 17-year-old killed a female student and wounded another in a shooting incident at a Nashville high school cafeteria on Wednesday, according to police.
The shooter, who was also a student at Antioch High School, later shot and killed himself, Metro Nashville Police spokesperson Don Aaron said at a press conference.
The student who was wounded in the shooting suffered a graze, Aaron said.
A spokesperson for Vanderbilt University Medical Center told TV station News 2 that another student was taken to Vanderbilt Pediatrics for treatment of an eye injury that happened after the shooting.
Aaron said there were two school resource officers in the building when the shooting happened. They were not near the cafeteria where the shooting took place, and by the time they got down there, the shooting had stopped and the shooter had used a handgun to kill himself, Aaron said.
The school has about 2,000 students and is located in a neighbourhood of Nashville about 16 km southeast of downtown.
School officials asked parents not to go to the high school to pick up their children but to go to a nearby hospital instead. Students were being bused there as they were released from the school by police.
At the hospital being used as a reunification centre, officials were helping shocked parents to get back with their children.
Dajuan Bernard was waiting at a Mapco service station to reunite with his son, a 10th grader, who was being held in the auditorium with other students on Wednesday afternoon.
He first heard of the shooting from his son who “was a little startled”, Bernard said. His son was upstairs from where it took place but said he heard the gunfire.
“He was OK and let me know that everything was OK,” Bernard said.
“His mom wants to homeschool anyway, so I don’t know. We might consider it,” he said.
“This world is so crazy, it could happen anywhere. We’ve just got to protect the kids and raise the kids right to prevent them from even doing this. That’s the hardest part.”
FBI spokesperson Elizabeth Clement-Webb said in an email that Nashville police had not asked for the federal agency’s help in the shooting investigation as of early Wednesday afternoon.
