“We did not find any manifesto, any diary that spelled it out, any suicide note, or any writings that will clearly identify his motives behind this assault,” Capt. Kent Wegener of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said at a news conference Friday.
The police also identified a 15-year-old girl, Gracie Anne Muehlberger, as one of the students who died in the Thursday morning shooting. Her father said in a brief phone interview that the family was grieving.
The gunman survived, but remains in critical condition. The police say he had walked into the quad of Saugus High School just after 7:30 a.m. on Thursday, his birthday, before firing seemingly at random for 16 seconds.
“It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment act,” said Sheriff Alex Villanueva of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
When students realized the popping noises they heard were gunshots, they fled into classrooms and away from the school. Dozens took refuge in a choir classroom, which the teacher barricaded with a grand piano before tending to a student’s gunshot wounds.
The injured victims — a 14-year-old girl, a 15-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy — were all in stable condition by Thursday night, the authorities said.
The police have declined to name the suspect because he is a minor. Investigators searched his house, which is less than 2 miles from the school, and the FBI was scouring social media for clues. The police initially said they believed that the suspect had posted on Instagram shortly before the shooting, but they later said the account in question did not belong to him.
Santa Clarita is home to many police officers, firefighters and emergency workers, and the first three police officers to respond to the shooting were off-duty officers who had dropped family members off at the school.
Detective Daniel Finn had just driven away from the school when he saw children running from gunfire.
Finn, who works in the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station, turned his car around, ran onto campus and provided medical aid to several victims. He was quickly joined by off-duty officers from the Inglewood Police Department and another from the Los Angeles Police Department. A flood of additional officers then arrived.
As police officers searched the campus for the suspect — they did not initially realize he had shot himself — students cowered in classrooms. Hundreds of students fled to a nearby park, where they reunited in tearful hugs with their parents, many of whom had raced to the school after getting texts from their children.
This article originally appeared in
.