Police engaged in 25-minute shootout with Texas high school gunman
By
Kate Randall
21 May 2018
It has been three days since a horrific school shooting took the lives of eight students and two teachers, and wounded 13 others, at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas. In a scene all too familiar in America, a lone gunman—student Dimitrios Pagourtzis—entered Santa Fe High School, about 35 miles southeast of Houston, and started shooting.
On Friday morning, Pagourtzis hid a shotgun and a .38-caliber handgun under his trench coat before opening fire in his first-period art class. Student Breanna Quintanilla, 17, who was wounded during the assault, said she was in the classroom on what she described as a “perfectly normal day” when she heard the shots ring out. She said that when Pagourtzis walked in, he pointed a weapon at one person and said, “I’m going to kill you.”
Galveston County Sheriff Henry Trochesset told CNN Sunday that the shooting lasted for a terrifying 30 minutes. The first shots were fired not long after classes began around 7:30 a.m. local time. Officers arrived at the high school art lab section about four minutes into the shooting and encountered the shooter, according to Trochesset.
For the next 25 minutes, police officers and the gunman engaged in a gunfight. When asked by CNN whether all of the victims were shot by Pagourtzis, Trochesset said that authorities will need to determine that after the medical examiner completes the autopsies. His response leaves open the question of whether some of the victims were in fact shot by police officers responding to the shooting. Trochesset said that “a decent amount of cameras” were in the school, and that video would be examined.
According to a police affidavit, Pagourtzis “gave a statement…