(Reuters) – A teenage boy on Wednesday opened fire inside a Tennessee high school, killing one student and wounding another before taking his own life, police said.
Nashville police said in a statement on social media that a 17-year-old male student fired multiple shots using a pistol inside the cafeteria at Antioch High School. A girl, 16, was shot and killed. Another boy, aged 17, was grazed by a bullet in his arm and wounded.
Police identified the boy who carried out the shooting as Solomon Henderson. They said the name of the girl killed is Josselin Corea Escalante. They were investigating a motive for the violence.
Antioch High School has about 2,000 students and is located in a suburb southeast of Nashville.
The violence is the latest in a series of school shootings witnessed in the United States in recent decades, and nearly two years after a shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville left three young students and three school staff members dead.
“My heart goes out to these families as they face unimaginable loss,” Metro Nashville Public Schools Director Adrienne Battle said during an afternoon press conference, according to the Tennessean newspaper.
Battle added that Antioch High School has multiple safety measures in place, including a secured vestibule at the school entrance, school resource officers and cameras with weapon-detection software, according to the Tennessean.
There were 330 school shootings in the U.S. last year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, a website founded by researcher David Riedman that lists such shootings since 1966.
Last year’s total was the second-highest, topped only by 2023 when there were 349 such incidents, according to the K-12 database.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York and Brad Brooks in Colorado; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
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