Another high school has turned into a scene of carnage, this time in western Kentucky.
14 people have been wounded, two of them fatally, after a shooter opened fire Tuesday morning at Marshall County High School, Gov. Matt Bevin said at a news conference.
Another five people sustained other injuries.
A 15-year-old male student was reportedly arrested at the scene and will be charged with murder and attempted murder, Bevin said at the conference.
The murdered victims were a boy and a girl, both 15 years old.
The girl reportedly died at the scene and the boy died at a hospital, State Police Commissioner Richard W. Sanders said.
The conditions of the injured students are not known.
Sanders said that the suspect, armed with a handgun, walked into the school at 8:57 a.m. ET and started shooting.
Naturally, as word of the shooting spread across Benton, parents panicked about the fate of their children.
A 17-year-old special needs student, Daniel Austin, was hospitalized. His parents had called his cell phone incessantly until someone in the emergency room picked up and said Daniel had been shot.
Daniel Austin was wounded during the mass shooting at Marshall County High School.
His mother Andrea rushed to the hospital, bewildered as to why this happened.
Victim Daniel Austin
“Teachers love him. Students love him. I don’t think anything can say one bad thing about him,” Andrea Austin said. “And that’s not because I’m his mom. Everybody loves him.”
Austin said that her son was shot in the right arm, which might need to be amputated.
She praised the heroics of a fellow student and a teacher, who had quickly scooped up Daniel after the gunfire stopped, rushed him to a car and drove him to a hospital.
2 school shootings in 2 days
The violence in Marshall County, a rural area near the western tip of Kentucky, has completely stunned the governor. Authorities have not provided a possible motive.”It is unbelievable that this would happen in a small, close-knit community like Marshall County,” Bevin said in a statement. “This is a tremendous tragedy and speaks to the heartbreak present in our communities.”
The incident has also stirred painful memories of the 1997 school shooting that killed three students in West Paducah — just 32 miles from the high school in Benton.
Tuesday’s attack came just one day after another school shooting, in Texas.
On Monday, a 15-year-old female student was shot in the city of Italy, officials said.
She was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Dallas. The suspect, a 16-year-old male, was “apprehended within minutes,” city officials said.
The motive for that shooting is also still unclear.