Maryland school shooting: Two students injured and shooter dead after gun attack

The shooting comes a little more than a month after a school shooting in Parkland, Florida left 17 people dead

The student who shot two other students at Great Mills High School in southeast Maryland has died after a school resource officer fired at him, the sheriff for St Mary’s County has said.

The school day had barely begun when a student shot a male and female student in a hallway before exchanging fire with a campus security officer, county Sheriff Timothy Cameron told NBC’s Washington affiliate.

The officer ended the attack at the Great Mills, Maryland high school, about 70 miles from Washington, by injuring the shooter. Mr Cameron told a news conference that the shooter and the officer both fired a round and it wasn’t immediately known if the officer’s bullet killed the suspect.

The female student is in critical condition, the male student is in stable condition and the shooter, a male, has died, the sheriff said.

Information was not available immediately on the relationship between the students, Mr Cameron added. A motive is not yet clear.

The resource officer who stopped the attack was unharmed, and the school’s roughly 1,600 students were later escorted off campus by police.

“Please pray for us. There was a loud sound and everyone started screaming and running,” a young woman named Mollie Davis, who identified herself as a student at Great Mills, posted on Twitter.

The violence on Tuesday came a little more than a month after 17 students and faculty were killed in shooting at a Florida high school.

The Valentine’s Day attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida inspired has inspired an intense national debate over gun control in the US.

Last week, students from Great Mills joined thousands across the US who walked out of their classrooms to attend protests, rallies and silent sit-ins as part of an unprecedented call for action against gun violence.

Jake Heibel, the principal at Great Falls, apparently told parents last month that the school had investigated threats of a possible shooting and found they were “not substantiated”.

Mr Heibel told parents that school officials interviewed two students in February who had been overheard mentioning a school shooting. The officials found that the students posed no threat, he said in a letter posted on the local news site The Bay Net.

But Mr Heibel said the school still increased its security after social media posts about a possible school shooting “circulated quite extensively”.