SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — After a deadly shooting at a classroom in a San Bernardino elementary school on Monday, the city’s bishop is praying for the victims and the school community.
“I’m praying for the victims & entire school community after today’s tragic shooting @NorthPark Elem. May God console us in this time of sorrow,” Bishop Gerald Barnes of San Bernardino tweeted April 10.
As The Associated Press reported: “A man walked into his estranged wife’s elementary school classroom in San Bernardino and opened fire without saying a word, killing her and an 8-year-old student before shooting himself in a murder-suicide that spread panic across a city still recovering emotionally from a terror attack just 15 months ago.
“A 9-year-old student also was critically wounded. He and the boy who died were behind their special-education teacher, Karen Elaine Smith, 53, the target of the man she had married months earlier, police said.”
There have been several shootings at schools in the United States in recent years.
In December 2013, an individual opened fire at Arapahoe High School in the Denver suburb of Centennial, and in December 2012 a gunman killed 20 children and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, as well as his mother and himself.
San Bernardino is also the site of a December 2015 mass shooting in which a couple killed 14 and wounded 21 others at a social-services facility.