One killed, five injured after student opened fire in Perry High School Iowa
Shooter was a victim of bullying
Credit:SilentMatt Psychedelic, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
One death has been confirmed in the shooting yesterday, Jan. 4, at Perry High School, Iowa. A student was killed while five others were injured.
They were shot by their fellow student, a 17-year-old named Dylan Butler.
The teen opened fire at the high school before classes resumed on the first day after the winter break, killing a sixth-grader and wounding five others as students barricaded in offices, ducked into classrooms and fled in panic.
The suspect died of what investigators believe is a self-inflicted gunshot wound, an Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation official said.
Authorities said one of the five people wounded was an administrator, later identified by his alma mater as Perry High School Principal Dan Marburger.
Two friends and their mother who spoke with The Associated Press said Butler was a quiet person who had been bullied for years.
Authorities said Butler had a pump-action shotgun and a small-caliber handgun. Mitch Mortvedt, the state investigation division’s assistant director, said during a news conference that authorities also found a “pretty rudimentary” improvised explosive device and rendered it safe.
The suspect’s motive is being investigated and authorities are looking into “a number of social media posts” he made around the time of the shooting, Mortvedt added.
A law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said federal and state investigators are interviewing Butler’s friends and analyzing Butler’s social media profiles, including posts on TikTok and Reddit.
Shortly before Thursday’s shooting, Butler posted a photo on TikTok inside the bathroom of Perry High School, the official said.
The photo was captioned “now we wait” and the song “Stray Bullet” by the German band KMFDM accompanied it.
Sisters Yesenia Roeder and Khamya Hall, both 17, said alongside their mother, Alita, that Butler was bullied relentlessly since elementary school, but it escalated recently when his younger sister started getting picked on, too. His parents brought it up to the school, they said, and that was the “last straw” for Butler.
“He was hurting. He got tired. He got tired of the bullying. He got tired of the harassment,” Yesenia Roeder Hall, 17, said. “Was it a smart idea to shoot up the school? No. God, no.”
Perry High School senior Ava Augustus said she was awaiting a counsellor in a school office when she heard three shots. Unable to flee through a small window, she and others barricaded the door and were ready to throw things if necessary.
“And then we hear ‘He’s down. You can go out,’” Augustus said through tears. ”And I run and you can just see glass everywhere, blood on the floor. I get to my car and they’re taking a girl out of the auditorium who had been shot in her leg.”
Three gunshot victims were being treated at Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines, a spokesperson said. Others were taken to a second hospital, a spokesperson for MercyOne Des Moines Medical Center confirmed.
Mortvedt said one person was in critical condition but the injuries didn’t appear to be life-threatening, and the others were stable.
