At a press conference, Police Chief Michael Sack said the shooter was in his 20s, but did not provide a name for himself or his victims. He declined to say whether the slain woman was a teacher.
The superintendent of schools in St. Louis, Kelvin Adams, said seven security guards were at the school at the time, each at a locked entry point into the building. One of the guards noticed that the man was trying to enter through a closed door, but was unable to. The guard notified school officials and made sure police were contacted, Sack said.
“It was this security officer’s timely response, the fact that the door caused pause for the suspect, that bought us time,” Sack said.
He declined to say how the man eventually got in, armed with what he described as a long gun. Central Visual and Performing Arts shares a building with another magnet school, the Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience, which was also evacuated. Central has 383 students, Collegiate 336.
Officers worked to get the students out of the three-story brick building, then “ran toward that shot, located that shooter and engaged him in an exchange of gunfire,” killing him, Sack said.
Monday’s school shooting was the 40th this year to result in injuries or deaths, according to an Education Week count, the most in a single year since it began tracking shootings in 2018. These include the killings at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May, when 19 children and two teachers died. The shooting of St. Louis on Monday came on the same day that a Michigan teenager pleaded guilty to terrorism and first-degree murder in a school shooting that killed four students in December 2021.
Some of the six people hospitalized suffered gunshot wounds, while others were hit by shrapnel, Sack said. He did not give any information about his conditions.
One student, Taniya Gholston, 16, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who was in a room when the shooter entered.
“All I heard was two shots and he came in there with a gun,” Gholston said. “And I was trying to run and I couldn’t run. He and I made eye contact, but I found him out because his gun jammed. But we saw blood on the ground.”
Ninth-grader Nylah Jones told the Post-Dispatch that she was in math class when the shooter fired into the room from the hallway. The shooter was unable to enter the room and pounded on the door as students huddled in a corner, he said.
Janay Douglas’ 15-year-old daughter was stuck in a hallway when the school was on lockdown. Douglas said he got a call from his daughter to let her know she heard gunshots.
“One of her friends came in the door, she was shot in the hand and then she and her friends ran out. The phone went off,” Douglas said. “I was on my way.”
The shooting left the mayor of St. Louis, Tishaura Jones.
“Our kids shouldn’t have to go through this,” Jones said at the news conference. “They shouldn’t be going through active shooter drills in case something happens. And unfortunately that happened today.”
The school district closed all its schools for the rest of the day and canceled all extracurricular activities, including sports.
Central Visual and Performing Arts High School is a magnet school specializing in visual, musical and performing arts. The district’s website says the school’s “educational program is designed to create a nurturing environment where students receive a quality academic and arts education that prepares them for successful competition at the postsecondary level or for proficient performance in the world of work”.