A teenage boy opened fire at a Tennessee high school on Wednesday, killing one student and wounding another before killing himself, police said.
Nashville police said in a statement on social media that a 17-year-old male student fired multiple shots from a handgun in the cafeteria at Antioch High School. A girl, 16, was shot and killed. Another boy, 17 years old, was grazed by a bullet in the arm and injured.
Police identified the boy who committed the shooting as Solomon Henderson. They said the murdered girl's name is Josselin Corea Escalante. They investigated a motive for the violence.
Antioch High School has approximately 2,000 students and is located in a suburb southeast of Nashville.
The violence is the latest in a series of school shootings seen in the United States in recent decades, coming nearly two years after a shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville left three young students and three school staff dead.
“My heart goes out to these families who are facing unimaginable loss,” Adrienne Battle, director of Metro Nashville Public Schools, said at an afternoon news conference, according to the Tennessean newspaper.
Battle added that Antioch High School has multiple security measures in place, including a secure vestibule at the school entrance, school staff 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 has listed such shootings since 1966.
Last year's total was the second highest, not to be surpassed until 2023 when 349 such incidents occurred, according to the K-12 database.
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