Two students were injured in a school shooting in northern California, officials said on Wednesday afternoon, and the suspected shooter is dead.
The injured students, five- and six-year-old boys, are in “extremely critical” condition and being treated at a Sacramento-area trauma center, the Butte county sheriff, Kory Honea, told reporters on Wednesday evening.
“The fact that they are being treated by medical staff currently is great,” Honea said. “It’s good that they’re still in a position to be treated. But we’re not out of the woods yet.”
He added that law enforcement was confident that they knew who the shooter was and that they found a handgun at the scene, but declined to identify him or discuss a possible motive.
Reports of a gunman at the Feather River School of Seventh-Day Adventists in Oroville, a city of 20,000 people in the state’s far north, came in around 1pm. Minutes later, a California highway patrol officer arrived at the school to find a man dead by a self-inflicted gunshot wound and two severely injured kindergarteners.
While details on the shooter remain scant, Honea said that investigators believed the shooter targeted the school – which serves about 35 students ranging from kindergarten to eighth grade – because of its affiliation with the Seventh-Day Adventist church. Honea said that the shooter had been dropped off at the campus by a rideshare service. Days before, he had made an appointment with an administrator to discuss enrolling a family member at the school.
The appointment appeared normal, Honea adds, but investigators are looking into whether the meeting was set up as a ruse to get into the school.
Butte county’s district attorney and the head of the FBI’s Sacramento field office joined Honea at the press conference to highlight the investigative help they plan to offer local law enforcement and the victim services they say they will deliver to the families of the injured students and the other children affected by the shooting.
Buses arrived at the school on Wednesday afternoon to transport students and reunite them with their parents. Chaplains and crisis counselors would be available to help those affected, Honea said.
Oroville was the site of a high-profile shooting in 2022 when a man opened fire on a Greyhound bus bound for Los Angeles, killing one person, a 43-year old traveling with her two children, and injuring four others, including a pregnant woman.
“Here we are again in Butte county dealing with another major incident, major tragedy,” Honea said. “This community has endured so much in the last three years, it’s hard to believe we’re back here again.”
The region has found itself in the national spotlight repeatedly in recent years, largely because of highly destructive and often deadly wildfires, including the 2018 Camp fire that killed 85 people, which Honea gestured to in his remarks to reporters outside the Feather River School.
“This is another tragedy that has been visited upon our community,” he said. “I hope people can appreciate how tough this is for the students of this school, the faculty of the school, the members of this community, all the first responders.”
