MURRYSVILLE, Pennsylvania: Police are still trying to determine why a 16-year-old boy stabbed 21 students and a security guard in the crowded halls of his suburban Pittsburgh high school before an assistant principal tackled him.
At least five students were critically wounded in the attack Wednesday, including a boy whose liver was pierced by a knife thrust that narrowly missed his heart and aorta, doctors said. Others also suffered deep abdominal puncture wounds.
The rampage — which came after decades in which US schools geared much of their emergency planning toward mass shootings, not stabbings — set off a screaming stampede, left blood on the floor and walls, and brought teachers rushing to help the victims.
The suspect, Alex Hribal, was taken into custody and treated for a minor hand wound, then was brought into court in shackles and a hospital gown and charged with four counts of attempted homicide and 21 counts of aggravated assault. He was jailed without bail, and authorities said he would be prosecuted as an adult.
As for what set off the attack, Murrysville Police Chief Thomas Seefeld said investigators were looking into reports of a threatening phone call between the suspect and another student the night before. Seefeld didn’t specify whether the suspect received or made the call.
The FBI joined the investigation and went to the boy’s house, where authorities said they planned to confiscate and search his computer.
At the brief hearing, District Attorney John Peck said that after he was seized, Hribal made comments suggesting he wanted to die.
Defense attorney Patrick Thomassey described Hribal as a good student who got along with others, and asked for a psychiatric examination.
Thomassey told ABC’s Good Morning America on Thursday that any defense he offers would likely be based on Hribal’s mental health. He said he hoped to move the charges against the teenager to juvenile court, where he could be rehabilitated. If convicted as an adult, Hribal faces likely decades in prison.
Thomassey said Hribal is remorseful, though he acknowledged his client didn’t appear to appreciate the gravity of his actions. “At this point, he’s confused, scared and depressed. Over the next few days we’ll try to figure out what the heck happened here,” Thomassey said.
“I think he understands what he did. ... I don’t think he realizes how severely injured some of these people are.”
The attack unfolded in the morning just minutes before the start of classes at 1,200-student Franklin Regional High School, in an upper-middle-class area 15 miles (24 kilometers) east of Pittsburgh.
It was over in about five minutes, during which the boy ran wildly down about 200 feet (60 meters) of hallway, slashing away with knives about 10 inches (254 millimeters) long, police said.
Assistant Principal Sam King finally tackled the boy and disarmed him, and a police officer who is regularly assigned to the school handcuffed him, police said.
King’s son told The Associated Press that his father was treated at a hospital, though authorities said he was not knifed.
In addition to the 22 stabbed or slashed, two people suffered other injuries, authorities said. The security guard, who was wounded after intervening early in the melee, was not seriously hurt.
“There are a number of heroes in this day. Many of them are students,” Gov. Tom Corbett said during a visit to the stricken town. “Students who stayed with their friends and didn’t leave their friends.”
While several bloody stabbing rampages at schools in China have made headlines in the past few years, schools in the US have concentrated their emergency preparations on shooting rampages.
Nevertheless, there have been at least two major stabbing attacks at US schools over the past year, one at a community college in Texas last April that wounded at least 14 people, and another, also in Texas, that killed a 17-year-old student and injured three others at a high school in September.
Police looking for motive in US school stabbing
Police looking for motive in US school stabbing
Villagers massacred in South Sudan food aid trap
- Civilians killed after being lured from homes with promise of aid, witnesses say
NAIROBI: More than a dozen civilians were killed after being lured from their homes by fighters allied to South Sudan’s government under the pretense of being registered for humanitarian food aid, according to two people who survived the attack.
The killings took place on Saturday morning in the village of Pankor, in Ayod county, in the conflict-hit Jonglei state, about 400km north of the capital, Juba.
Women and children were among the victims.
HIGHLIGHTS
• The two survivors said that 22 people were killed and several more were injured. • Photos showed bodies of women and young men, some with their hands bound behind their backs, who appear to have been shot at close range.
Several dozen fighters arrived in pickup trucks and announced over a loudspeaker that they had come to register residents for food assistance, said the two survivors.
“They gathered them in a luak,” said one witness, referring to a traditional mud hut used to house cattle.
“People were thinking they would get aid or some help.”
The fighters then bound the hands of several men and opened fire on the group.
The two survivors said that 22 people were killed and several more were injured.
The government-appointed county commissioner said 16 people were killed.
Photos showed bodies of women and young men, some with their hands bound behind their backs, who appear to have been shot at close range.
The images, which were shared with AP by an opposition representative, are too graphic to publish.
Makuach Muot, 34, traveled to Pankor on Sunday for the funerals of eight relatives.
Most of the village’s residents had fled fighting months earlier, he said, leaving behind mainly elderly people and young children.
Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Lul Ruai Koang could not be reached for comment.
James Chuol Jiek, the government-appointed county commissioner of Ayod, confirmed that more than a dozen people, mostly women and children, had been killed in the attack.
He said the gunmen belonged to the Agwelek militia, a force drawn from the Shilluk ethnic group that has not been fully integrated into the national army but that has been deeply involved in recent military operations.
Jiek said the fighters had left their barracks overnight without their commander’s knowledge.
He said they told him the killings were revenge for attacks by a Nuer militia on Shilluk villages in 2022, during which hundreds of civilians were killed or abducted.
The government county commissioner condemned the killings and said that several officers had been arrested and that the army had disarmed 150 fighters from the battalion involved.
He disputed that people had been lured out for an aid registration. “This is an opposition lie,” he said.
In January, Agwelek militia commander Lt. Gen. Johnson Olony was filmed ordering his forces to kill civilians during military operations in Jonglei state. “Spare no lives,” he said.
“When we arrive there, don’t spare an elderly, don’t spare a chicken, don’t spare a house or anything.”
His remarks drew widespread rebuke from the UN and others. Olony has since apologized.
Armed clashes, aerial bombardments, and years of extreme flooding have left more than half of Ayod county’s population facing severe food insecurity.
Ayod county lies in northern Jonglei state, an opposition stronghold and a flashpoint in renewed fighting that the UN estimates displaced 280,000people since December.
Aid groups have warned that access restrictions to opposition-held parts of the state were endangering civilian lives.
Residents of northern Jonglei are overwhelmingly from the Nuer ethnic group of suspended vice president and opposition leader Riek Machar.
Opposition officials have repeatedly called the government’s actions in Nuer areas of the country “genocidal.”
Reath Tang Muoch, a senior official in the SPLM-IO, called Olony’s remarks “an early indicator of genocidal intent.”
