US: Gunman commits suicide after school shooting spree

A gunman opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University today, injuring at least 17 people before he killed himself.

“Police are confirming that the shooter is dead by a self-inflicted gunshot,” the school said on its website.

The university had issued a statement about an hour after the shooting that “the immediate danger has passed. The gunman is no longer a threat”.

Kishwaukee Community Hospital spokeswoman Theresa Komitas said the clinic had received 17 victims all with wounds from the shooting or flying debris, including three with serious injuries. She said she knew of no deaths at the hospital.

George Gaynor, a fourth-year geography student, who was in Cole Hall when the shooting happened, said the shooter was “a skinny white guy with a stocking cap on”.

He described the scene immediately following the incident as terrifying and chaotic.

“Some girl got hit in the eye, a guy got hit in the leg,” Mr Gaynor said outside just minutes after the shooting occurred. “It was like five minutes before class ended too.”

Witnesses said the young man carried a shotgun and a pistol. Student Edward Robinson said that the gunman appeared to target students in one part of the lecture hall.

“It was almost like he knew who he wanted to shoot,” Mr Robinson said. “He knew who and where he wanted to be firing at.”

Dominique Broxton, a 22-year-old student, told the Chicago Tribune she could see two wounded students from her room.

“The ambulance took away two students on the ground right outside my dorm,” she said. “I don’t know them. They looked bloody.”

The school was closed for one day during final exam week in December after campus police found threats, including racial slurs and references to shootings earlier in the year at Virginia Tech, scrawled on a bathroom wall in a dormitory.

Police determined after an investigation that there was no imminent threat and the campus was reopened.

The shooting was the fourth at a US school within a week.

On February 8, a woman shot two fellow students to death before committing suicide at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge.

In Memphis, Tennessee, a 17-year-old is accused of shooting and critically wounding a fellow student on Monday during a high school gym class, and the 15-year-old victim of a shooting at an Oxnard, California, junior high school has been declared brain dead.