1 Student Dead in North Carolina High School After Classmate Opens Fire, Police Said

A student at a high school in a Charlotte, North Carolina, suburb was dead Monday, after authorities said a male student opened fire in a hallway before classes began.

The two students were fighting in a hallway at Butler High School in Matthews, North Carolina, according to a spokesman with the Matthews Police Department. Surveillance video showed one student shoot the other around 7:10 a.m. Eastern time, police said, but the kind of weapon was not immediately identified.

The student believed to have been the gunman is being questioned by police. Authorities have not publicly identified the students, but the families of both students have been notified.

“We’re incredibly saddened by the fact that we had a loss of life on one of our campuses today,” Clayton Wilcox, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools superintendent, said during a news conference outside of Butler High School. “What makes it doubly difficult is that it was one of our students who was the shooter.”

A school resource officer called police Monday morning, saying he was with the victim and that he had the perpetrator in custody, said Stason Tyrrell, a patrol commander for the Matthews Police Department, during the news conference. The school, with its hallways crowded with students before classes began, immediately went into lockdown, according to police.

Several police officers in the immediate area responded as well, police said. The victim was transported to the Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the student died, police said.

“It’s been an extremely tragic event for us here in Matthews,” Tyrrell said. “It is still an active investigation.”

After the shooting, many students were picked up by their parents, but classes remained in session for students that had not been picked up, according to Wilcox.

In the wake of the Parkland school shooting that left 17 dead, Wilcox proposed to county commissioners a $1.5 billion budget that included salary raises for teachers and funds for school safety measures. The budget allocated $9 million for hardened doors, two locksmiths, perimeter fencing, additional locks, glass reinforcement and classroom surveillance cameras. The budget also allocated $600,000 for nine security positions that included five police officers.

The budget was approved in June.

“I don’t know how a young person gets” a gun in North Carolina, Wilcox said, “but we are going to look into all of these things and make sure it never happens again.”