A six-year-old child deliberately shot a teacher at an elementary school in Virginia on Friday afternoon, according to police.
Police said in a statement that they have arrested the boy accused of shooting a female teacher at Richneck elementary school in Newport News, Virginia, a city in the south-eastern part of the state.
Police said they were notified about 2pm that the teacher had been shot inside the school during an altercation of some kind.
“We did not have a situation where someone was going around the school shooting,” Newport News police chief Drew told reporters. “We have a situation in one particular location where a gunshot was fired.”
He added that the shooting was not an accident.
The student has since been taken into custody, and the teacher, a woman in her 30s, was taken to a local hospital to be treated for injuries that were “believed to be life-threatening”, according to the police department. Drew told reporters the teacher’s condition had improved somewhat by late afternoon.
He didn’t discuss any details about how the child is thought to have gotten the gun used in the shooting. But the chief told reporters that officers had moved children on the campus to the school gymnasium, and they were “safe” there while officers processed evidence that was still on the scene of the shooting.
Drew also said that there were “plenty of counseors” working with the students in attempts to keep them calm.
“The number one priority … is to get all our students back with their parents,” he said.
A police statement said officers had implemented a system to reunite the students with their parents, dividing them by grade level.
“An officer and a school official are walking the student to their parents, so it’s a good happy reunion, a little bit of emotion, but everything right now is safe,” Drew said.
Friday’s shooting will almost certainly stoke debate about restricting public access to guns in the US, even after Congress passed a bill last year that tightened restrictions on access to firearms for some people who are considered to be at risk of carrying out violence.
High-profile instances of gun violence across the US last year included the killings of 10 at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and 21 at a school in Uvalde, Texas.
