At least two people were killed and six others injured Thursday by the son of a policewoman, who opened fire on the campus of a University of Florida, the police announced. The shooter was injured by the police and was hospitalized.
The two deceased are not students, said the Tallahassee police, the city where the tragedy took place. The suspect is a 20-year-old young man who was studying at the Florida State University, the establishment he attacked at midday.
According to the police, he used a weapon belonging to his mother, a local sheriff agent, who has worked for the county of Leon for 18 years.
The suspect “invoked his right to silence,” said the police. He was part of a youth consultation organization of his services.
Images filmed by witnesses and broadcast by the CNN television channel showed the panic that has taken hold of the University of 40,000 students. We see a young man walking quietly on a lawn and shooting people who try to run away.
“Surrealist”
Several students testified that they had heard shots near the student associative office. “Everyone started running out of the building,” said Wayne, a young man interviewed by the local television channel WCTV.
“About a minute later, we heard about eight to ten shots,” he added. The young man said he saw another student hit in the stomach. “All of this was completely surreal. I couldn’t believe what I saw,” he said.
Another student, Sam Swartz was in the basement of the associative office when the shots broke out. “Everyone has started to panic,” he told Tallahassee Democrat newspaper, saying that she had heard a dozen shots.
Eight people, who worked on a project, gathered in a corridor and barricaded themselves with garbage cans and plywood panels, he said.
Right to have weapons
President Donald Trump deplored a “shameful and horrible” tragedy, while defending the right of Americans in the process to have firearms. “These events are terrible, but it is not the weapons that are shooting, it is people,” he said.
The Republican Governor of Florida Ron Desantis sent his “prayers” for the Florida State University, in a message on the social network X.
With more firearms in circulation than residents, the United States displayed the highest firearm mortality rate in all developed countries. The killings are a recurring scourge that successive governments have so far failed to stem, many Americans remaining very attached to their arms.
In the United States, the right to wearing a weapon is protected by the second amendment to the Constitution.
In 2024, more than 16,000 people, not to mention suicides, were killed by firearm, according to the NGO Gun Violence Archive. United States on social networks.
This article was published automatically. Sources: ATS / AFP
