Iowa school shooting: Student armed with shotgun kills child and injures five others

One student has died and five were injured in a school shooting in Iowa, police have said.

The student who was killed was a sixth-grader, so would have been 11 or 12 years old.

The gunman, 17-year-old Dylan Butler, was also a student at the school. He died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot.

Butler was armed with a pump-action shotgun and a handgun. Police said he was making posts on social media around the time of the attack.

An improvised explosive device was discovered when the school was searched by police.

Among those injured were students and an administrator, and one person is in a critical condition.

Dallas County Sheriff Adam Infante said there is no further risk to the public after the attack took place before classes had begun.

“Luckily, there were very few students and faculty in the building, which I think contributed to a good outcome in that sense,” he said at a news briefing.

The shooting took place at about 7.30am local time (1.30pm UK time) at Perry High School and officers arrived seven minutes later, the sheriff added.

A huge amount of emergency vehicles surrounded the building that houses both the town’s middle school and high school after the shooting.

‘The most scared I have been in my entire life’

Zander Shelley was in a hallway waiting for the school day to start when he heard gunshots and dashed into a classroom, according to his father Kevin.

The 15-year-old was grazed twice and hid in the classroom before texting his father at 7.36am.

Kevin Shelley, who drives a rubbish truck, told his boss he had to leave work.

“It was the most scared I’ve been in my entire life,” he said.

Another student, Ava Augustus, described barricading a door after being unable to flee through a small window – and finding things to throw at the attacker if needed.

“And then we hear ‘He’s down. You can go out,'” she said through tears. “And I run and you can just see glass everywhere, blood on the floor. I get to my car and they’re taking a girl out of the auditorium who had been shot in her leg.”

‘One of our teachers started screaming at us’

A student named only as Carlos, who was outside the school at the time of the shooting, told NBC News: “I just heard a couple of bangs, not really gunshots. They were not very loud.

“We saw a bunch of kids running and we asked what happened … one of my girlfriend’s friends said it was a shooting, there was a shooter with a gun, and we got scared, we thought it was a prank or something.

“That’s when a bunch of cops started coming and we knew it was serious, we were trying to leave and one of our teachers started screaming at us.”

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US President Joe Biden is following the latest on the Iowa shooting, a White House official said – adding that senior staff have been in touch with the Iowa governor’s office.

Vigils have been planned at a nearby park and a local church, and the high school is going to remain closed on Friday.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds said: “This senseless tragedy has shaken our entire state to its core.”

The shooting occurred on what was to be the first day of the spring semester, according to the school district’s calendar.

Perry, a town of about 7,900, is about 40 miles (64km) northwest of Des Moines, the state’s capital city.

The mass shooting comes days before the Iowa caucuses, which will kick off the process of Republicans choosing their nominee to run for president in the 2024 US election.

While the attack has once again sparked calls for stricter gun laws, such policies are non-starters in rural, Republican-leaning states like Iowa.

The state does not require a permit to purchase a handgun or carry a firearm in public, though it mandates a background check for a person buying a handgun without a permit.

There were 346 incidents where a gun was brandished or fired at a US school – or a bullet hit school property – in 2023. That’s the highest since records began in 1966, and the third year in a row that the record has been broken.

Four incidents have already been reported since 2024 began.