By REMY TUMIN and EMILY COCHRANE NYTimes News Service
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A 17-year-old male student armed with a pistol opened fire in a high school cafeteria in Nashville, Tennessee, on Wednesday, fatally shooting a 16-year-old female student and injuring a male student before killing himself, police said.

Don Aaron, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, said the student who had been injured was grazed in the arm by a bullet at Antioch High School, about 20 miles southeast of downtown Nashville, and was being treated at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. A male student was also being treated for what Aaron described as a facial injury from a fall.

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The assailant, Solomon Henderson, fired multiple shots in the school’s cafeteria after 11 a.m., before shooting himself in the head, police said. The 16-year-old girl who was killed was Josselin Corea Escalante, police said.

At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, Chief John Drake of Nashville police said that the shooter took the bus to school Wednesday morning, went into the restroom to retrieve his weapon and then went into the cafeteria. The motive for the shooting was still unclear, but the chief said that officials were reviewing the student’s online material. It was not clear if the shooting was targeted or not, Drake said.

“As a city, as a community, it is impossibly difficult to be here once again, to be here dealing with devastation of gun violence,” said Mayor Freddie O’Connell.

A student, who gave his name only as Ahmad, told Nashville TV station WSMV that he was in the cafeteria when gunfire erupted. He and his friends hid behind garbage cans before they could make their way to the football field as they passed victims who had been shot and were bleeding on the ground.

“I wish I could save them,” he said. “I feel a lot of pain and grief and depression knowing that I can’t do a thing to help them, just seeing them get shot in front of my face like that.”

Antioch High School will be closed for the remainder of the week, school officials said.

Officials had set up a reunification area for parents.

“I join Tennesseans in praying for the victims, their families &the school community,” said Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, adding in a post on social media that he been briefed on the incident.

In Nashville, trauma still lingers from the 2023 shooting at the Covenant School, which was the deadliest school shooting in state history. A former student breached the campus of the private school, killing three 9-year-old students and three staff members before police shot and killed the assailant.

But even after thousands of protesters flooded the halls of the state Capitol, joining some parents of surviving students in pleas for tougher gun laws, the Republican supermajority in the Tennessee General Assembly has balked at changing the laws.