A sixth grader was killed and five others injured after a teenage gunman opens fire in a school in Iowa.
via: NBC News
Moments before a 17-year-old unleashed gunfire at Iowa’s Perry High School, killing a sixth grader and wounding five other people, the student is believed to have posted a foreboding TikTok video.
On the morning shooter Dylan Butler opened fire, a TikTok post believed to be from the shooter shows him the inside a school bathroom posing with a blue duffel bag, captioned: “Now we wait.”
The song “Stray Bullet,” by the German band KMFDM, accompanies the post, which has been removed from the platform; the student gunmen who carried out the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado also had cited the group’s lyrics, CNN has reported.
Butler – who also died amid Thursday’s horror, a law enforcement official told CNN – “made a number of social media posts in and around the time of the shooting,” said Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of the Iowa Department of Public Safety Division of Criminal Investigation. “Law enforcement are working to secure those pieces of evidence,” he added.
New details also are emerging about whether Butler may have been bullied, though his motive might never be confirmed. He was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Mortvedt said.
Still, investigators are trying to determine why Butler entered the school with pump-action shotgun and small-caliber handgun, Mortvedt said. Officers also discovered a rudimentary explosive device after the killer went on the deadly rampage before classes started on the first day back to school since winter break.
The attack marked the second shooting on a US school property in just the first few days of this year. Last year, more than 80 such shootings erupted on school grounds nationwide, a CNN analysis shows. The US this year also has suffered an average of at least one mass shooting every day in which at least four victims are shot, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Now, survivors and witnesses in a small city near Des Moines are echoing the same sentiment as others who have suffered the horror of mass shootings in America:
“It doesn’t feel real,” student Rachael Kares told CNN. “This is like one of those things where you see on TV and you’re like that never gonna linger its way toward my community, but it does happen. It’s really real.”
