RIO DE JANEIRO - As family members mourned their loved ones and kept vigil at hospitals for the injured, this city searched for understanding Thursday after a shooting at a public school left 12 students dead and 12 others wounded.
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Ricardo Moraes/Reuters
A woman with a photo of her niece, a student at a Rio de Janeiro school attacked by a gunman, waited for news on Thursday.
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Marcelo Sayao/European Pressphoto Agency
A wounded boy was taken to a hospital after a mass shooting at a school in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday.
Brazil is no stranger to urban violence, especially the kind of violence in gang-controlled slums that have given this city one of the highest murder rates in the world. But the specter of the schoolhouse massacre was thought to be a mostly American affliction.
On Thursday, the Tasso da Silveira elementary and middle school, a three-story aqua-and-yellow schoolhouse in the working-class neighborhood of Realengo, on the west side of Rio, joined the ranks of Columbine High School in 1999 and Virginia Tech University in 2007, sites of other school shootings. For the victims' families, the massacre brought those tragedies home.
"We hear about terrorists abroad and we think it will never happen here," said Clemilson Perreira Chagas, 30, whose cousin Jessica Perreira, 15, was killed Thursday. "But it does."
The police said that Wellington Menezes de Oliveira, 24, entered Tasso de Silveira around 8 a.m. A former student at the school, Mr. Oliveira told a teacher who recognized him that he was there to speak to a class.
Minutes later, with an ammunition belt strapped to his waist and a .38-caliber pistol in one hand and a .32-caliber gun in the other, he opened fire wildly in two first-floor classrooms. The classroom walls are covered with bullet holes from the shots that missed, the police said.
The children began running and trying to hide. A boy who was wounded fled the school and found a police officer nearby, officials said.
The officer, Sgt. Marcio Alves, saw Mr. Oliveira leaving a classroom and ordered him to drop the guns. Mr. Oliveira ignored the order and began climbing a staircase to more classrooms, Sergeant Alves recounted later. Sergeant Alves shot, hitting the gunman in the leg.
Mr. Oliveira then shot himself in the head.
During the attack, having stopped to reload twice, Mr. Oliveira killed 10 girls and 2 boys, ages 12 to 14. They died from bullet wounds mostly to the head and chest, said Martha Rocha, the chief of Rio's Civil Police.
A letter found in Mr. Oliveira's pocket made it clear that the attack was premeditated, and that he intended to die, but it offered no motive for the shootings.
Instead, he left explicit instructions for his burial - he wanted to be near his adopted mother, who died in 2009 - and the disposition of his house, which he wanted to donate to an animal shelter. He asked to be buried in a way that reflected some aspects of Islamic tradition, including in a white sheet he said he left in a bag on the first floor of the school, but he also asked Jesus for eternal life.
In the only reference to his deed, he sought "God's forgiveness for what I have done."
A longtime neighbor and former member of Mr. Oliveira's church said Mr. Oliveira had been a lifelong Jehovah's Witness before turning to Islam two years ago. Other neighbors on the street where he grew up said he had few friends and spent many hours in front of his computer on social networking sites. In the past year, several said, he had taken to wearing black clothing.
"People thought it was strange when he began wearing black, but we could never imagine he was going to do something like this," said Fabio Santos, 27, who said he knew him for more than 10 years. "Maybe it was because his mother and grandmother had died."
After his mother died, he and his father moved away. It was around that time that he left his job as a warehouse manager for a food exporter, Mr. Santos said. Mr. Oliveira came back to the Realengo house alone now and again, neighbors said.
"He was a very lonely person," said Elda Lira, 55, a neighbor who said she had known him since he was a baby. "He was always isolated and in his own world."
Sérgio Cabral, Rio's governor, called him an "animal and psychopath."
Mr. Cabral has been at the heart of efforts to reduce gun violence in Rio ahead of the city's twin billing on the world stage - the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. But those efforts have been focused on clearing out violent drug gangs from some of Rio's most dangerous slums, not on securing schools from armed former students.
Brazil has also been struggling to contain the flow of arms that feed the violence.
With students and family members in a state of shock, Eduardo Paes, Rio's mayor, said the school would remain closed on Friday.
But family members of the victims questioned whether the school should ever reopen.
"I heard there was blood splattered all over the school," said Bianca Assis, 24, whose cousin Edson Clayton, 14, was among the wounded. "What mother will allow her child to ever go back there?" As a minimum, she said, the state needed to provide more security in the schools.
"If the school continues to be open" to unchecked visitors, "these kinds of things will continue to happen," Ms. Assis said. "Today we had dead people, tomorrow we will have rapes."
Friends and family members huddled outside the Albert Schweitzer Hospital on Thursday, waiting anxiously for news, as surgeons inside treated wounded students.
By early afternoon, news of the shooting had spread throughout the country, shocking officials. President Dilma Rousseff became visibly emotional at an event in Brasília when she asked those present to observe a minute of silence for the "defenseless children" in Realengo.
"This type of crime is not characteristic of our country," she said. "All of us here, men and women, are united to repudiate this type of violence.
A twelfth child has now died in Brazil's worst ever school shooting spree, carried out in Rio De Janeiro by a former pupil.
The mass murderer, who killed 10 girls and two boys, was named by police as 24-year-old Wellington Menezes de Oliveira, a former pupil at the Tasso da Silveira primary school.
De Oliveira eventually took his own life after police shot his legs and he fell down some stairs.
In footage released from one of the school's CCTV cameras, children can be seen scrambling for their lives as they flee the classroom where de Oliveira is carrying out his appalling act of vengeance.
CCTV Footage Of Shooting Incident
As the tragedy continues to unfold a teacher bursts from the room and flees down the corridor - then the killer can be seen apparently calm, leaving the room with a gun clasped in his hand.
Detectives said he entered the classroom armed with two loaded revolvers and opened fire soon after the morning bell rang.
Student survivor Jade Ramos described the scenes of terror saying: "He kept telling the kids to face the wall and was shooting at their heads.
"The children kept begging, 'No, please!' There was a lot of blood, children agonizing on the stairs."
Police were alerted to the shootings when two young boys, at least one with a gunshot wound, ran up to two officers on patrol about two blocks away.
A girl is carried to safety from the school following the shooting
The officers sprinted to the school and at least one quickly located the gunman on the second floor and traded shots with him.
Officer Marcio Alves said: "He saw me and aimed a gun at me, I shot him in the legs, he fell down the stairs and then shot himself in the head."
A further eleven school children were injured in the gun attack on Thursday in which the shooter also died.
The wounded survivors of the attack are being treated at the Albert Schweitzer hospital. Some have gunshot wounds to the chest and head.
He came into the class saying he was going to give a talk ... and without saying anything took out a pistol from his bag and started firing
Eyewitness Dorival Porto Rafael
Local police commander Djalma Beltrame told Globo TV de Oliveira had left a letter at the scene indicating he wanted to kill himself.
But he said the note did not give a clear motive for the mass shooting.
"It was a premeditated act," Beltrame said. "He was clearly a hallucinating person."
He said the attack could have been far worse had a police patrol not driven past the school at the time and heard gunfire.
Parents and relatives await news outside the school
"If the police did not arrive as quickly as they did the tragedy could have been far worse, because this man had a lot of ammunition and was carrying two guns," he said.
The school teaches about 300 children aged nine to 14 years.
A clearly shaken Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said: "It's not common for this country to see such a crime.
"This is not representative of the country. Innocent children lost their lives and their future".