A suspect is in custody after a high school shooting left three people, including the shooter, injured in Kansas.
The shooting took place in the school administration office area at Olathe East High School on Friday. The injured individuals include a resource officer and a school administrator, who police has confirmed as being the school principal, according to KMBC.
No further information about the suspect has been released to the public following the shooting southwest of Kansas City in the eastern part of the state.
The Olathe Police Department said that there’s no danger to the public but they still urged people to stay away from the area as the investigation was ongoing.
“School resource officer shot and injured, administrator shot and injured,” the department tweeted just before noon on Friday. “Stand by on reunification area. No active threat at this time. No reports of injured students at this time.”
A police spokesman said authorities were notified of the shooting just before 10.30am when the school’s resource officer radioed the police to say that he and an administrator had been shot. He added that the suspect had also been shot.
Olathe Police said the officer is expected to be okay and that the principal is also expected to survive, according to KMBC.
The suspect is reportedly a student at the school.
Police have said that students will be taken to Pioneer Trail Middle School to be reunited with their parents, according to The Kansas City Star.
“I’ll freak out later,” mother Nicole Maniscalco, who has two children at the school, told the paper. “They need to see how mom’s got this.”
At 12.03pm, Olathe public schools tweeted: “Olathe East is currently under lockdown due to an active shooting situation on campus. Please know that law enforcement is on site and the building is secured. Olathe East and surrounding school buildings have been secured.”
Forty minutes later, they added: “To clarify, if your loved one was injured, you would have already been contacted by the police department. We will provide additional updates as soon as they are available. Thank you for your patience.”
KMBC reported that agents from the Kansas City Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have been sent to the area to help police.
Kansas’ Democratic Governor Laura Kelly tweeted: “Our thoughts are with the entire Olathe East High School community today. We are closely monitoring the situation on the ground & are in communication with law enforcement.”
Overland Park Regional Medical Center spokesperson Christine Hamele said in a statement that the hospital was treating three patients from the shooting. One was in a critical condition, another was in a critical but stable condition, and a third was in a stable condition, The Kansas City Star reported. The patients were not identified.
Kansas Democratic state Senator Cindy Holscher went to California Trail Middle School to pick up her child.
“I’ll never be the same after this,” she told the paper. “You see the reports. You hear the things that go on in other places, but until you’re there standing on that sidewalk looking at that school waiting to hear from your child.”
“I mean, it’s the worst feeling ever. You know, we’ve been trying to make changes. I’m not talking about radical changes. I’m just talking about simple things to help people be a little bit safer,” she added.
“Just this past week, we had a hearing for red flag bills, and you know those are the bills that if there’s an identifiable threat, the guns are removed for a time to hopefully prevent a shooting during a domestic violence situation or a shooting of law enforcement, and one of the opponents actually said, ‘we can’t do this because gun owners will be upset if their guns got scratched when they were confiscated’,” Ms Holscher said. “If that’s where our focus is going to be, worried about a gun getting scratched, we’re going to keep seeing this.”
