A 14-year-old York County, Pa., student shot and fatally wounded his junior high school principal in a cafeteria full of teenagers last week before killing himself, officials said.
The shooting took place at 7:30 a.m. on April 24 at Red Lion Area Junior High School. The student, later identified as James Robert Sheets, was armed with “several handguns,” Red Lion Borough Police Chief Walt Hughes said in a press conference broadcast on national television later that morning.
The principal of the 970-student school, Eugene Segro, was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital shortly after the shooting.
“To our knowledge right now, there was nothing going on when this went down,” the police chief said. “If [Mr. Segro] was the target of a plot or a plan, we have no information to support that right now.”
No one else was hurt in the incident, police said.
“The school district is grieving the loss of our beloved junior high school principal,” said Larry Macaluso, the superintendent of the Red Lion schools. “We will continue to make plans to deal with the rest of our students, the staff, and our parents and have them work through this.”
The 5,300-student Red Lion district, located southeast of Harrisburg, was the site of a machete attack on a kindergarten class that wounded several students, the principal, and two teachers at an elementary school in February 2001. (HEADLINE, Feb. 14, 2001.)
—DARCIA HARRIS BOWMAN
