Two students were injured in a shooting at a school in the northern part of the country Californiaofficials said Wednesday afternoon, and the suspected shooter is dead.
The injured students, five- and six-year-old boys, are in “extremely critical” condition and are being treated at a Sacramento-area trauma center, Butte County Sheriff Corey Honea told reporters Wednesday evening.
“The fact that they are being treated by medical personnel right now is great,” Honea said. “It is good that they are still able to be treated. But we’re not out of the woods yet.”
He added that law enforcement is confident they know who the shooter was and found a gun at the scene, but declined to identify him or discuss a possible motive.
Reports of a gunman at Feather River Seventh-day Adventist School in Oroville, a town of 20,000 in the state’s far north, came in around 1 p.m. Minutes later, the California Highway Patrol arrived at the school to find a man dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and two kindergarteners critically injured.
Although details about the shooter remain scarce, Honea said investigators believe the gunman targeted the school, which serves about 35 students in kindergarten through eighth grade, because of its affiliation with the Seventh-day Adventist church. Honea said the shooter was dropped off at the campus by a rideshare service. Days before, he had made an appointment with an administrator to discuss enrolling a family member in the school.
The arrangement seemed normal, Honea added, but investigators are looking into whether the meeting was staged as a ruse to get into the school.
The Butte County District Attorney and the head of the FBI’s Sacramento field office joined Honea at the news conference to highlight the investigative assistance they plan to offer to local law enforcement and the victim services they say they will provide to the families of the injured students and other children affected by the shooting.
Buses arrived at the school Wednesday afternoon to transport students and collect them with their parents. Chaplains and crisis counselors will be on hand to help those affected, Honea said.
Oroville was the site of a high profile shooting in 2022, when a man opened fire on a Los Angeles-bound Greyhound bus, killing one person, a 43-year-old woman traveling with her two children, and injuring four others, including a pregnant woman.
“Here we are back in Butte County dealing with another major incident, a major tragedy,” Honea said. “This community has been through so much in the last three years, it’s hard to believe we’re back here.”
The region ended up in the national searchlight repeatedly in recent years, in large part because of highly destructive and often deadly wildfires, including the 2018 camp fire that killed 85 people, which Honea pointed to in remarks to reporters outside the Feather River School.
“This is another tragedy that has befallen our community,” he said said. “I hope people can appreciate how difficult this is for the students of this school, for the teachers at the school, for the members of this community, for all the first responders.”
