A student has been shot dead at a South Carolina middle school by another student.
Gatekeepers News reports that Jamari Jackson, 12, was fatally shot on Thursday in the seventh-grade hallway, by an unidentified teenage shooter, also 12. He was immediately transported to Prisma Health Greenville Memorial but died at about 5p.m.
The motive of the shooter is yet to be known.
A student who claimed to be friends with the shooter said he witnessed the cold-blooded killing.
“We were just walking down the hallway,” a seventh-grade student named Michael, told WSPA. “He was walking really fast and he looked really nervous, and there was just a whole crowd of kids. All of sudden, he just reaches into his backpack and just pulls out gun [and] fired one shot.
“I didn’t think twice, I just ran,’ he said. ‘I just thought: “Oh my god, he’s going to shoot the school.”‘
Michael claimed he’s never seen his friend “walk that fast and kind of nervous like that’ before, but he didn’t think anything would happen.
“Everyone standing around us were just screaming and running. And all of sudden, I look behind me and kids are just running inside classrooms and locking the doors and everything. And he didn’t know what to do, he just ran.”
The suspected shooter was found hiding under a desk inside a residence on the 3000 block of Easley Bridge Road not far from the school, police said.
“He was hiding. He’s a young man, probably didn’t understand the consequences of what had just happened,” Greenville County Sheriff Hobart Lewis said at a press conference.
“I don’t think he knew what to do honestly, except for to leave the school.”
He has been charged with murder, possession of a weapon during a violent crime, possession of a firearm on school property and unlawful possession of a weapon by a person under the age of 18.
The teenage shooter is in custody at the Department of Juvenile Justice in Columbia.
Police said they are unsure of the motive, but that the two students were familiar with each other.
“While the motive for the shooting and how the suspect was able to get possession of a firearm is still under investigation, we can confirm that the victim and suspect were familiar with each other and we are confident the incident was isolated,’ Lewis said.
The Jackson family released a statement asking for privacy and that they were ‘all devastated by today’s tragedy.’
“We love Jamari dearly and we would ask that our privacy be respected as we grieve during this very difficult time,’ they said in a statement.
‘That was my man,’ Jackson’s grandfather Marshall told the Greenville News outside of the hospital as he cried. Other family members were reportedly at the hospital as well.
