Gunman dead, 2 children injured in Northern California school shooting, sheriff says

Ishani Desai and Rosalio Ahumada, The Sacramento Bee on Dec 4, 2024

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A suspected gunman was found dead and two students were hospitalized with gunshot wounds Wednesday after Northern California authorities responded to a reported shooting at a faith-based elementary school in Butte County.

About 1 p.m., deputies responded to 911 calls reporting a suspected gunman who had fired shots at students on the Feather River Adventist School campus just outside of Oroville.

Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said deputies, along with other law enforcement officials, arrived at the school campus and found a man believed to be the suspected shooter dead. He said the man found on the ground appeared to have suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The sheriff said there were two students who suffered gunshot wounds and were taken to hospitals to receive medical treatment; one of them was taken by helicopter. Honea did not have additional information about the wounded students or their conditions.

He also said investigators were still working on positively identifying the man found dead at the school, “but It does not appear at this point that the individual has any connection to this campus.”

“We are very early on in this investigation. There (are) still a lot of unknown questions and answers that we’re trying to obtain,” Honea said in a news conference just outside the school. “As we get more information, of course, we’ll update you.”

He said the school has been “locked down and the threat has been neutralized. I don’t have concern for anybody’s safety here right now.”

The rest of the students at the school have been taken to the Oroville Church of Nazarene at 2238 Monte Vista Ave., according to the Sheriff’s Office. Parents were asked to arrive there to be reunited with their children.

The Feather River Adventist School is a K-8 campus run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church to provide a “spiritually oriented education for children,” according to its website, which said the school had an enrollment of 33 students as of early 2022. The campus is located just off Highway 70, roughly 60 miles north of Sacramento.

The school is just north of Sutter County. The Sutter County Sheriff’s Office in a statement said it is “aware of the incident” and described it as “an isolated incident that has been contained.”

“I hope that people can appreciate how tough this is for the students of the school, the faculty of the school, the members of this community, all the first responders,” Honea told news reporters. “We’re doing everything we can to determine what happened in addition to making sure that everybody is safe.”

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