A 12-year-old girl was taken into custody after two students were shot inside a classroom at a Los Angeles middle school on Thursday, authorities said.
The gunfire wounded a 15-year-old boy, who was shot in the head and was in serious condition, and a 15-year-old girl, who was struck in the wrist and was in fair condition, the Los Angeles Fire Department said. Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center listed both as stable, saying they were expected to make full recoveries.
Three other people — a 30-year-old woman, an 11-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl — suffered minor injuries and were taken to hospitals, the fire department said.
“We know this a very traumatic incident for all the children involved, particularly inside that classroom,” said Steven Zipperman, chief of the Los Angeles school system police department.
The shots erupted shortly before 9 a.m. (noon ET) at Salvador Castro Middle School, just west of downtown Los Angeles. A gun was recovered, police said, and the campus was declared safe.
Aerial video on local television showed a girl being led out of the school in handcuffs. It wasn’t immediately clear whether she was the student in custody, whom police hadn’t formally declared a suspect.
The father of a 12-year-old student told NBC Los Angeles that he went came to the school after learning about the shooting.
“You can’t process it,” he said. “It’s my son and everybody else’s kids in that school.”
The violence follows two other school shootings in the United States last week. A 16-year-old boy was charged with opening fire at a Texas high school on Jan. 22, wounding a teenage girl. And a 15-year-old boy was charged with opening fire at a Kentucky high school, killing two students and wounding 18 other people.
CORRECTION (Feb 1, 2018, 7:05 p.m. ET): A photo caption on an earlier version of this article misstated the location of the shooting. It was at Salvador Castro Middle School, not Belmont High School. (The schools share a campus.)
