3 Dead in Shooting at St. Louis High School

(Updated throughout with new details.) At least three people, including the shooter, were killed Monday in a shooting inside a St. Louis high school. The shooting just after 9am at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School forced students to barricade doors and huddle in classroom corners, jump from windows, and run out of the building to seek safety. The school was immediately surrounded by dozens of police vehicles, and St. Louis Public Schools tweeted that the shooter was "quickly stopped" by police. Police Commissioner Michael Sack said the three dead included a woman, a teenage girl, and the shooter, described as a man about 20 years old, the AP reports. Sack said security officials initially became alarmed when the shooter tried to get into the locked school building.

Sack declined to say how the man got inside, armed with what he described as a long gun. Six other injured people were hospitalized. Sack said some suffered gunshot wounds, while others were struck by shrapnel. One student, 16-year-old Taniya Gholston, tells the St. Louis Post-Dispatch she 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. Me and him made eye contact but I made it out because his gun got jammed. But we saw blood on the floor." TV reports said officers entered the area with guns drawn shortly after 9am.

Officers “ran to that gunfire, located that shooter and engaged that shooter in an exchange of gunfire," killing him, Sack said. Ninth-grader Nylah Jones tells the Post-Dispatch that the shooter fired into her math class from the hallway but couldn't get into the room. She says students piled into a corner of the room and tried not to move. Math teacher David Williams says a window in the door was shot out and he heard a man say, "You are all going to (expletive) die." Central Visual and Performing Arts High School, which was Southwest High School before 1992, is a magnet school specializing in visual arts, music, and performing arts. (More school shooting stories.)