Three children and three adults have been killed in a shooting at a primary school in the US city of Nashville, Tennessee, officials said.
The shooting happened on Monday at The Covenant School, a private Presbyterian school for about 200 students from preschool through sixth grade.
The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said the suspect was dead after being “engaged by officers”.
Police later said the shooter was a woman who “appeared to be in her teens”, but that they were still working to identify her. Police said she had “at least” two assault rifles and a handgun. A motive was not immediately clear.
The attack took place at a “lobby type area” in the school, and not in a classroom, a police official said.
All three children had gunshot wounds, officials said, and they were pronounced dead upon arrival at the Monroe Carell Jr Children’s Hospital in Vanderbilt. No further details were immediately released on their ages or their identities, or the identities of the killed adults.
The Nashville Fire Department also said on Twitter that there were “multiple patients”.
Students could be seen being walked to safety after the attacks, holding hands as they left their school surrounded by police cars.
They were brought to a nearby church to reunited with their parents.
Helicopter footage from the WTVF local news station showed police officers looking around a wooded area between the campus and a nearby road.
Jozen Reodica said she heard the police sirens and fire trucks blaring from outside her office building nearby. As her building was placed under lockdown, she took out her phone and recorded the chaos.
“I thought I would just see this on TV,” she told the Associated Press news agency. “And right now, it’s real.”
Attacks by gunmen in US schools have become relatively common and have most recently included included a massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas in which 19 students and two teachers were killed.
In February, a gunman killed three studenst and wounded five others in an an attack on the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing Michigan.
As of Monday, there had been at least 128 mass shootings in the US in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive tracker, which defines a mass shooting as involving four or more victims.
Since 2020, the number of mass shootings a year in the US has hovered above 600, with 646 recorded in 2022, according to Gun Violence Archive.
Meanwhile, a report by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) recorded a 61 percent jump in so-called “active shooter” incidents in the US in 2021 from the previous year, the most recent period analysed.
The department defines an “active shooter” as someone engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a public space in a seemingly random fashion. About one in five “active shooter” incidents in 2021 were also mass killings.
