Los Angeles – A California man shot and killed his wife, an elementary school teacher, in her classroom Monday, wounding two children, one fatally, before turning the gun on himself.
Jonathan Martinez, 8, a student at North Park Elementary School in San Bernardino, California, was killed along with teacher Karen Smith, 53, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing police. Another child aged nine was hospitalized in stable condition, according to police.
Police identified the gunman as Smith’s estranged husband Cedric Anderson, 53, who died at the scene of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Anderson opened fire around 10:30 Monday morning in the classroom where Smith and two other adults were working with children with developmental disabilities, police said.
San Bernardino Police Captain Ron Maass said police believed Smith, not the children, was Anderson’s intended target.
After the first emergency calls police locked down the school Monday morning. A child present in another classroom at the school told local media he heard three shots and was told by a teacher to duck, then run.
“There was a lot of people in my class crying and they were scared,” nine-year-old Jaidyn Stanley told the Los Angeles Times.
Students at the school, which teaches children from kindergarten to the sixth grade, were moved to another school building for safety before being reunited with parents.
Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said police were treating the incident as a “murder-suicide” incident of domestic violence.
The incident was the 12th shooting at a US school since the start of the year, according to gun violence research group Everytown Research.
According to its research, there have been 220 school shootings in the United States since 2013, with 59 people killed by guns in schools between 2013-2015 alone.
The incident came as a painful reminder of gun violence in seemingly safe public places for the southern California city, which is still recovering from a December 2, 2015, terrorist shooting.
In 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, opened fire on a holiday party for the county agency where Farook worked, killing 14 and injuring 22 others.
The pair, whom investigators say had sworn allegiance to the Islamic State group ahead of the attack, were killed later that day in a shoot-out with police.
Farook’s friend Enrique Marquez pleaded guilty in February to federal weapons charges for helping him procure the weapons used in the attack.
-dpa
