‘Bullied’ ex-student posted chilling Facebook photos before deadly school shooting in Brazil
- Two assailants, who wore hoods, were identified as former pupils aged 17 and 25
- Police said attack was inspired by the 1999 Columbine massacre in the United States
Her statement came as investigators sought a motive to the bloody rampage that police said was possibly inspired by the 1999 Columbine massacre in the United States
The hooded attackers, named as 17-year-old Guilherme Taucci Monteiro and 25-year-old Henrique de Castro, armed themselves with a gun, knives, axes and crossbows, for their assault Wednesday on Raul Brasil public school in Suzano, on the outskirts of Sao Paulo in southeast Brazil.
They killed five students and two adults before one killed the other and then himself, authorities said.
The men also shot and killed the owner of a used car business nearby before launching the attack on the school, authorities said.
Besides the five students, the dead included a teacher and a school administrator, said Joao Camilo Pires de Campos, the state’s public secretary.
Nine others were wounded in the school attack and hospitalised, he said.
“This is the saddest day of my life,” de Campos said.
“The big question is: what was the motivation of these former students?”
Monteiro’s mother, Tatiana Taucci, offered a possible answer, telling Band News while hiding her face from the camera that her son had been bullied at the school.
“Bullying, they call it. … He stopped going to school … because of this,” she said.
She said she was surprised by his involvement and found out about the attack from the television like everyone else.
Minutes before the attack, Monteiro, who an investigator said was the leader and main planner, posted 26 photos on his Facebook page, included several posing with a gun and one that showed him giving the middle finger as he looked into the camera.
In some of the photos, he wore a black scarf with a white imprint of a skull and cross bones. No text accompanied the posts.
Facebook later removed Monteiro’s page.
Security camera footage from the school’s entrance published on the website of O Globo newspaper showed Monteiro entering the school around 9:30am.
He immediately pulled a pistol out of his jeans and shot into a group of eight students, hitting at least two, who dropped to the floor.
Castro entered the school a few seconds later and put a crossbow and backpack on the floor. He then pulled out an axe and hacked at the bodies on the ground.
Students flooded into the entrance foyer, running into Monteiro. He grabbed one girl by the hair and punched her several times in the face.
She managed to escape, and students frantically scrambled out of the school.
The attackers were also carrying petrol bombs, authorities said.
With a record 63,880 murders last year, Brazil is easily the world’s most homicidal nation
“In 34 years as a policeman, it’s the first time I see someone use a crossbow like that,” police Colonel Marcelo Salles said.
“It is horrendous.”
Police arrived eight minutes after the shooting started, and the attackers were already dead, Salles said. Investigators said they had a pact to die together in the attack although Globo TV, citing police, reported that Monteiro killed Castro, and then turned the pistol on himself.
Crime scene photographs released by police show Monteiro, his head lying in a pool of blood, dressed in black with a machete tucked in his pants.
Castro’s body lay near Monteiro’s, with the crossbow on the ground between the pair.
The two assailants spent more than a year planning their attack, which they “hoped would draw more attention than the Columbine massacre,” an investigator said on condition of anonymity.
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In the 1999 attack on Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, two students killed 13 people.
The Raul Brasil Professor public school has more than 1,600 students from elementary to high school grades.
It is not the first mass school shooting in Brazil’s history.
In April 2011, a former pupil killed a dozen schoolchildren and injured many more before turning his gun on himself at a school in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil is one of the most violent countries in the world, with 64,000 murders in 2017 – a rate of almost 31 per 100,000 inhabitants, or three times higher than the level the United Nations classifies as endemic violence.
President Jair Bolsonaro expressed his sympathies on Twitter to “the families of this inhumane attack,” describing it as “a monstrosity and enormous cowardice”.
Bolsonaro controversially passed a law relaxing gun ownership rules soon after assuming power in January, delivering on a campaign promise.
He has also spoken out in favour of allowing people to carry weapons on the streets.
Politicians and social media users were quick to debate whether Bolsonaro’s measures, or images from similar such mass shootings on US schools and university campuses, were to blame for this attack.
Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse
