

At least 8 people died and according to Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said that eight to 10 people, both students and adults.

According to the Houston Chronicle, it has been confirmed by law enforcement officials that 9 have died and area hospitals reported at least a dozen others were injured.

The Chronicle from Houston is reporting, An attacker was armed with an AR-15-style rifle, a pistol, a shotgun and pipe bombs, the official said.

"Officers inside encountered a bloody mess in the school," the source said, adding, "Evidently this guy threw pipe bombs all in there. We don't know if any of them went off."

Their update around 12:52 states,

"Eight students were taken to Clear Lake Regional Medical Center in Webster, all suffering from gunshot wounds, a spokeswoman said. Six have been discharged. One is in critical condition, another in fair condition.

Two other students were taken to Mainland Medical Center in Texas City. They did not have wounds but were being treated in connection with the attack, the spokeswoman said.

The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston was treating three people with wounds: A male under 18 with a gunshot to the leg; a middle-aged woman with a gunshot to the leg, and a man in his 50s who is a Santa Fe school police officer and retired Houston police detective, according to Joe Gamaldi, who heads the Houston Police Officer's Union. He remains in surgery with a gunshot to the upper arm, near the chest, Gamaldi said. Hospital officials said the older male they were treating has significant blood loss and was in critical condition."

According to the Chron, Gamaldi said that he retired in January after many years in law enforcement with the city.

In piecing the story together through various sources,

Galveston County Judge Mark Henry said the first reports of a shooting came in around 7:45 a.m. He told reporters that "suspected material" has been found off campus and that people should not touch anything they find that looks suspicious, and should call 911.

I can't help but point out the date 18, 2018 encodes 9/11.

Gunshots were heard just before 8:00 a.m. CT

According to Reuters, this school is about 30 miles Southeast of Houston.

At 11:04 a.m. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told reporters the number of dead could rise as high as 10. The detained suspect is believed to be a student, he said, and most of the dead are students.

One student told a local ABC affiliate fire alarms went off around 7:45 a.m. in the school. This caused students to leave their classrooms.

A reddit member from the Great Awakening forum pointed out that CBS news tweeted this which is very interesting to note.

Another student told the media someone had walked into the classroom and a girl was shot in the leg.

Santa Fe High School 10-grader Dakota Shrader said she heard alarms go off and students exited to a grassy area, waiting for an all-clear as in a normal fire drill. Then she heard three gunshots and screams of "Run! Run!"

Shrader ran as fast as he could to a wooded area, started having an asthma attack and called her mother.

"The world, I just don't like what it's becoming," Shrader said. "Every school shooting, kids getting killed, innocent kids getting killed. No family should have to suffer that just because somebody wants to be selfish and go out and hurt other people. It's just not right at all."

You can hear Shrader's story and the Sheriff here

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Shots-fired-at-Santa-Fe-High-School-12925050.php

Trey Lemley, 17, said he was in the school's first floor art room when a shooter walked in, his sister, Courtney Lemley, 19, said.

Trey dropped his phone and barricaded himself inside one of the room's two closets, she said. When he left, he saw three bodies and pools of blood.

Courtney and her boyfriend, 19-year-old Austin Evans, graduated from the school last year. They said the art room is located near a main, back exit of the school, and the room itself has an exit that leads to the parking lot.

After being turned away from the school, Courtney and Evans walked to Arcadian First Baptist Church, where Courtney's mother works.

According to the Daily Chronicle, "three medical helicopters landing at the school in Santa Fe, a city of about 13,000 people."

They also reported this, One student told Houston television station KTRK in a telephone interview that a gunman came into her first-period art class and started shooting. The student said she saw one girl with blood on her leg as the class evacuated the room.

"We thought it was a fire drill at first but really, the teacher said, 'Start running,'" the student told the television station.

The student said she did not get a good look at the shooter because she was running away. She said students escaped through a door at the back of the classroom.

Authorities did not immediately confirm that report."

"Students who witnessed a shooting at a Texas high school Friday morning described a frantic scene, with teachers yelling for students to run as shots rang out. One student told CBS affiliate KHOU he heard as many as 20 gunshots.

Another described seeing the shooter wearing a trench coat and armed with a sawed off shotgun before barricading themselves inside their classroom.

Michael Farina, 17, said he was on the other side of campus when the shooting began and thought it was a fire drill. He was holding a door open for special education students in wheelchairs when a principal came bounding down the hall and telling everyone to run. Another teacher yelled out, "It is real."

Students were led to take cover behind a car shop across the street from the school. Some still did not feel safe and began jumping the fence behind the shop to run even farther away, Farina said.

Police had found explosives in the building.

Student Damon Rabon told CBSN he was one classroom away from where the shooting happened in the art hall during first period. He said he was in shop class when he and other students heard "this loud banging, kind of ringing noise." He said at first they thought a desk fell or someone hit the shop door.

Then, they heard the same noise three or four more times.

Rabon said the substitute teacher went out and looked and saw the shooter, who he described as a short male wearing a black trench coat carrying a backpack and armed with a sawed-off shotgun. The teacher got everyone back in class and told everyone to get down and they barricaded the door.

The student said the substitute teacher pulled the fire alarm in the hopes that other students would evacuate.

Student Zach Lawford told KHOU he heard the first shot "clearly" and heard as many as 20 more shots.

Rabon described several minutes of chaos with students crying before they reminded each other to use active shooter training techniques they had learned in drills several times already that year. They barricaded the door, shut off the lights and sheltered in place.

"It was just so scary, you could hear him walking, you'd hear him walking right past our classroom," Rabon said. "You could hear the shots, 'boom, boom, boom.' Thank God he didn't come into our classroom."

Other witness accounts can be found here https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-shooting-santa-fe-high-school-witnesses-describe-frantic-scene-today-2018-05-18/

According to yet another CBS news report,

Students were accompanied by police while existing the field and made to empty their backpacks on the school field.



A suspect was taken into custody and a second one detained according to the Indpendent.

Suspected shooter is Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17 years old. Some say he was a talented football player, but others say he was bullied by students and another teacher.

See some of his social media here

https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/slideshow/Dimitrios-Pagourtzis-on-social-media-181519/photo-15575397.php

More about Pagourtzis can be found here https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/slideshow/Dimitrios-Pagourtzis-on-social-media-181519/photo-15575397.php

The Metro states, "After the massacre, police rushed to the trailer park were Pagourtzis lived amid reports it had been booby-trapped with explosives. He is said to have used improvised explosive devices and pipe bombs during the slaughter."

Read more: https://metro.co.uk/2018/05/18/santa-fe-shooting-suspect-student-dimitrios-pagourtzis-wore-born-kill-t-shirt-7558129/?ito=cbshare

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MetroUK | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MetroUK/

Witnesses told ABC the shooting took place in an art class on campus between 7:30 and 7:45 am local time. A junior at the school said students were participating in what seemed to be a fire drill when they started hearing shots.

"The teachers are telling us to stay put but we're all just running away," 14-year-old Angelica Martinez told CNN.

Many students ran to the nearest gas station and those without a phone tried to contact their parent there. It is the Road Runner Chevron gas station just down the street located on Highway 6.

Footage of this can be viewed here

https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/Students-refuge-gas-station-Santa-Fe-High-School-12925705.php

This afternoon, Police have blocked off at least a half mile of State Highway 6, about four miles northwest of the high school, where they are investigating a home. The highway is lined with trees and sparsely populated with a row of small frame houses and some trailers.

Officers are investigating a home about a three miles away from the high school.

According to the Chron of Houston, Texas, Police are speaking with teachers in the school gym to piece together a timeline of the shooting, according to a television reporter who was there. It appeared most students have been turned over to their parents.

They'd been arriving at the gym in the hours after the shooting. to pick them up or find out where they'd been sent.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/santa-fe-school-shooting-latest-today-texas-active-victims-police-gun-a8357846.html

This is interesting verbage from the Daily Chronicle, "The shooting was all but certain to re-ignite the national debate over gun regulations. In the aftermath of the Feb. 14 attack on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, survivors pulled all-nighters, petitioned city councils and state lawmakers, and organized protests in a grass-roots movement.

Within weeks, state lawmakers adopted changes, including new weapons restrictions. The move cemented the gun-friendly state's break with the National Rifle Association. The NRA fought back with a lawsuit.

In late March, the teens spearheaded one of the largest student protest marches since Vietnam in Washington and inspired hundreds of other marches from California to Japan."

It is also interesting to note that yesterday, Yesterday, David Hogg, a student from the Parkland high school that reignited a national conversation on gun control, had a chilling premonition. He said gun violence kept him up at night.

"There is someone alive right now that will not be alive at this time tomorrow and has never even thought about gun violence, but everyone around them will have to for the rest of their lives," he told reporters in Los Angeles.

Sheriff Gonzalez is the 30th Sheriff of Harris County.

According to Harris County So,

"Sheriff Gonzalez earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Houston Downtown and went on to serve 18 years in the Houston Police Department. Sheriff Gonzalez started out as a civilian employee and became a police officer, rising through the ranks to Sergeant. He served on the elite hostage negotiation team and was assigned to the Homicide Division as an investigator.



After retiring from the Houston Police Department in 2009, Sheriff Gonzalez served three terms on the Houston City Council representing District H. He was elected by his peers in 2010 to serve as Vice Mayor Pro-Tem and was appointed Mayor Pro-Tem in 2012 by Mayor Annise Parker."

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office is the largest Sheriff Office in the State of Texas, and the third largest nationwide. Sheriff Gonzalez leads upwards of 5,000 employees to protect the County’s 4.5 million residents within the 1,700 square miles of Harris County.

Source, https://www.harriscountyso.org/AboutUs/About_Me.aspx

As far as Gonzalez in the news, here is a story of a police officer who was terminated under Gonzalez in March of 2018

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Harris-County-Sheriff-Ed-Gonzalez-fires-deputy-12852192.php