USA, shootout on a campus in Alabama

“She was a teacher, at least three dead”

ALABAMA -Three dead and several wounded “in critical condition”. It is the provisional balance sheet of yet another shootout on a US university campus. This time it took place in the Shelby Center, the building that houses the faculty of mathematics and biology, of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. According to the first news from the mayor’s spokesman, a woman would have opened fire. The murderer is a teacher of about thirty who started shooting as soon as she learned that she had not been confirmed as professor at the institute. The three victims would also be employees of the University. The woman has already been captured. “The police – the university spokesman said – have secured the building. There is nothing left to fear.

“I heard three shots and screams from the Faculty of Medicine and Biology,” explains an engineering student at the University of Alabama. “The noises – continues the young woman – came from the third floor, where a conference was taking place”. 

Unlike the massacres of the past, starting with the most famous ones such as at Columbine High School in 1999 and Virginia Tech in April 2007, when the deaths were 32, today’s episode at the University of Alabama is all-female . Like that of February 9, 2008 at the University of Louisiana when it was, even on that occasion, a girl shooting and killing two students before taking her own life.

(12 February 2010)