A 17-year-old who opened fire at a Dallas high school on Tuesday, wounding five students, was able to bypass metal detectors by entering through an unsecured door that another student had opened for him, the authorities said.
The gunman, Tracy Denard Haynes Jr., was charged with aggravated assault as part of a mass shooting, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. He turned himself in to the authorities on Tuesday night.
The shooting at Wilmer-Hutchins High School, about 10 miles southeast of downtown Dallas, was the second episode of gun violence to occur there in almost exactly one year. Last April, a student was charged with shooting one of his classmates in the leg while they were in class.
Around 1 p.m. on Tuesday, investigators said, Mr. Haynes began shooting indiscriminately at a group of male students in a hallway after getting inside the school. The gunfire sent people running for cover, but one student was not able to get away, a school police officer said in the affidavit, citing security camera footage. That was when Mr. Haynes “appeared to take a point-blank shot,” the officer said.
Investigators said that five students were struck by the gunfire, which led the authorities to place the high school and a nearby elementary school on lockdown. Classes were canceled for the rest of the week at the high school. A motive for the shooting was not immediately clear.
Four of the students who were injured in the shooting were taken to hospitals, said Jason L. Evans, a spokesman for Dallas Fire-Rescue. As of Wednesday, two of them had been released, and the other two were being kept for observation, he said. It was unclear whether the fifth student who investigators had said had been struck by gunfire had received medical treatment.
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