By Ian Simpson
(Reuters) – A 16-year-old girl critically wounded this week by a fellow student at a Maryland high school has died, raising the number killed in the latest deadly U.S. school shooting to two, authorities said on Friday.
Jaelynn Willey died at 11:34 p.m. EDT on Thursday, surrounded by her family, the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement on Friday.
The death came hours after her mother said at a hospital that her daughter had been declared brain dead and would be taken off life support.
“It is with heavy hearts and great sadness we provide this update,” the sheriff’s statement said.
Willey, a student at Great Mills High School in southern Maryland, was shot by student Austin Rollins, 17, in a hallway on Tuesday. Willey had been in a relationship with Rollins that had recently ended, the sheriff’s office has said.
A school resource officer confronted Rollins and they simultaneously fired shots at each other, according to police. Rollins was wounded and died at a hospital. The officer was unharmed.
Investigators have been uncertain over who fired a shot that hit a 14-year-old student in the leg.
(Reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
(Reuters) – A student shot and critically wounded two fellow students at a Maryland high school before a campus security officer ended the attack by wounding the shooter, a law enforcement official said.
The shooter shot a male student and a female student at Great Mills High School in St. Mary’s County, and was then wounded by a campus security officer, county Sheriff Timothy Cameron told MSNBC. All three were in critical condition at hospitals.
It was not clear whether the student shooter was shot by the security officer or wounded in another fashion.
The reason for the shooting was unclear, Cameron said, adding, “We don’t know the relationship; we don’t know the motivation.”
The violence was the latest in a decades-long series of shootings at U.S. schools and colleges, coming a little more than a month after 17 students and faculty were killed in a rampage at a Florida high school.
Great Mills High School is in St. Mary’s County, which is about 70 miles south of Washington.
The shooting occurred amid a re-energized national debate over school shootings in the United States following the attack on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. It was the deadliest mass shooting at a U.S. high school.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen and Gina Cherelus in New York; Editing by Scott Malone and Jonathan Oatis)
