A teacher and a teenage student were killed in a school shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis., in an attack Monday that also injured six more people.
Authorities in Madison said that two students are in critical condition with life-threatening injuries, while three other students and a teacher sustained non-life-threatening injuries. Two of those students have since been released from area hospitals.
The shooting, just days before Christmas break, has left the Madison community in shock and searching for answers. In a statement, Gov. Tony Evers said he was praying for the families and loved ones whose lives were “so senselessly taken” and called the shooting a “gut-wrenching tragedy.”
“As a father, a grandfather, and as governor, it is unthinkable that a kid or an educator might wake up and go to school one morning and never come home. This should never happen, and I will never accept this as a foregone reality or stop working to change it,” he said in the statement.
For now, there are more questions than answers about what led to Monday’s events. Here is what we know so far.
Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes told reporters that at 10:57 a.m. local time, a second-grade teacher at the private school called 911 to report that a shooting was underway.
Police initially said the call came in from a second-grade student. That error, police said, was due to a mix-up in interpreting the 911 call log.
Police were on the scene in three minutes, Barnes said. Some officers, he noted, were in active-shooter training that very morning just a few miles away.
