MARYSVILLE, Wash. (AP) — A 14-year-old girl who was wounded when a student opened fire inside a Washingtonstate high school has died, raising the death toll in the shooting to three.
Gia Soriano died Sunday night, more than two days after she was shot, officials at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett said.
“We are devastated by this senseless tragedy,” her family said in a statement, read at a news conference by Dr. Joanne Roberts. “Gia is our beautiful daughter, and words cannot express how much we will miss her.”
Roberts said Gia’s family was donating her organs for transplant.
Another girl was killed Friday when a popular freshman at Marysville-Pilchuck High School north of Seattle opened fire.
The shooter, Jaylen Fryberg, died at the scene of a self-inflicted wound.
Three other students remain hospitalized, two in critical condition and one in serious condition.
Earlier Sunday, parents and students gathered in a gymnasium at the school for a community meeting, with speakers urging support and prayers and tribal members playing drums and singing songs. Fryberg was from a prominent Tulalip Indian tribes family.
Young people hugged each other and cried and speakers urged people to come together during the gathering Sunday.
“We just have to reach for that human spirit right now,” said Deborah Parker, a member of the Tulalip Indian tribes.
“Our legs are still wobbly,” said Tony Hatch, a cousin of one of the injured students. “We’re really damaged right now.”
Of the wounded students, only 14-year-old Nate Hatch showed improvement, though he remained in serious condition in intensive care at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Fifteen-year-old Andrew Fryberg also remained in critical condition in intensive care. Both are cousins of Jaylen Fryberg.
Meanwhile, 14-year-old Shaylee Chuckulnaskit remained in critical condition in intensive care at Providence Regional Medical Center.
The girl killed Friday hasn’t been officially identified.
Fryberg died in the attack, after a first-year teacher intervened. It’s unclear if he intentionally killed himself or if the gun went off in a struggle with a teacher.
The makeshift memorial on a chain link fence by the school, which will be closed this week, kept growing Sunday. Balloons honoring the victims and the shooter adorn the fence along with flowers, stuffed toys and signs.
The close-knit community, meanwhile, on the nearby Tulalip Indian reservation struggled with the news that the shooter was a popular teenager from one of their more well-known families.
A tribal guidance counsellor said no one knows what motivated Fryberg.
“We can’t answer that question,” said Matt Remle, who has an office at Marysville-Pilchuck High School, which is 30 miles north of Seattle. “But we try to make sense of the senselessness.”
In the nearby community of Oso, where a mudslide this spring killed dozens, people planned to gather to write condolence letters and cards.
Remele said he knew Fryberg and the other students well.
“My office has been a comfort space for Native students,” he said. “Many will come by and have lunch there, including the kids involved in the shooting.”
They all were “really happy, smiling kids,” Remle said. “They were a polite group. A lot of the kids from the freshman class were close-knit. Loving.
“These were not kids who were isolated,” he said. “They had some amazing families, and have amazing families.”
These factors make the shooting that much more difficult to deal with, “Maybe it would be easier if we knew the answer,” Remle said. “But we may never know.”
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Cue the gun control posts. I am a big supporter of gun control. But this isn’t about gun laws. Yes, if the handgun had been properly locked up and inaccessible to the boy, this terrible crime might not have been committed, and in that respect gun safety plays a role. But I doubt the boy’s family had any idea how mentally and emotionally troubled he was. And that’s what it’s really about–a community of kids who lack adult supervision of their lives and activities. Read their Twitter feeds, not just the shooter’s but other freshmen at the high school, friends of the shooter’s, friends of the victims, even the victims themselves. Many of the Tweets and re-Tweets are highly sexual, in some cases pornographic. It is clear that these 14-year-olds are sexually active and have been for some time. There are also ample references to pot and alcohol. A local newspaper, the Everett Herald, has a sympathetic profile of the shooter, an attempt to try to make some sense of what happened. A line from it “He was in a long-term relationship with a great girl.” How can a ninth grader have had a long term relationship? How old was he when it started – 12? Why are 14-year-old girls Tweeting about how great it is to wake up in bed with your guy? If someone sitting at a computer a thousand miles away can so easily get a picture of these kids’ activities, then why weren’t the parents and teachers and other adults in their lives just as easily able to do so? Fourteen-year-olds, sexually active right from the start of puberty, in relationships that belong in the adult world, kids without the mental and emotional maturity to deal with breakups and betrayal and jealousy. Kids in distress and anguish, who are in no way old enough to be navigating adult relationships. The shooter was clearly in pain, anguish, and angry. It looks like he wanted to make others see just how badly he was hurting, and to hurt the people who he blamed. Parents, wake up, pay attention to your kids, make an effort to know what is going on in their life and their world. Talk to them a lot, set some boundaries, don’t just be the adult-aged person in the house but otherwise uninvolved and unaware of your kids’ lives, *parent your children.
I am really sick of hearing about this kid being so happy and mentally stable. Happy, mentally stable kids do not take a gun to school and kill people, because some damn girl broke up with him, and happy, mentally stable kids do not post their mental angst on Twitter for months before they do it.
It is not hard to tell from what we know, that this kid grew up in a house full of guns, that apparently were easily accessible to him, so please spare me the NRA crap that this was just another mentally unstable kid, and not a gun problem. If you want to teach your kid to hunt then fine, but do not automatically suppose that kid is either mature enough or mentally stable enough to have easy access to them, when he wants to solve some emotional problem he is having.
‘But I doubt the boy’s family had any idea how mentally and emotionally troubled he was.’
Well, thanks for the typical NRA crap we hear every time, but you just ignorantly described the entire problem with their and your mentality that there should be no laws protecting the rest of us from people like this.
What you just basically said, is that this totally irresponsible gun obsessed family has more rights than the rest of us and our children do to be protected from them.
Look genius, hand your keys to your car to a 14 or 15 year old, and they kill someone, and see how fast you are held LEGALLY responsible. Why do you gun nuts think that something that is meant to kill and ONLY THAT being so easily accessible to a mentally sick kid, should be any different when it comes to holding parents responsible? That no parent ever is held responsible , and instead they are felt sorry for, IS THE REASON THAT THIS WILL CONTINUE TO HAPPEN!
Those parents are the LEGAL owners of those guns that their kids get hold of and kill people with, and damn it, it is long past time that we start holding those legal owners legally responsible for the deaths caused by their irresponsibility. These dam irresponsible parents are the ones responsible for these two dead girls, and yet they can continue to go on buying more guns to leave lying around their damn home. It is a FACT, that without their irresponsibility, two girls would be alive and going to school today, but to idiots like you they had no rights. Keep your damn guns, but I want laws holding every one of you irresponsible ADULTS who own them, held responsible when your kid uses one to kill.
I would take teen-age claims of sexual activity with a grain of salt.
Even if these were, by generally accepted standards, prematurely sexually active kids, that in no way should lead to killings. And if there were a causal connection, than that would be all the more reason to restrict access to guns.
Added: Kids have early sex around the world, yet we’ve had over twice the number of school shootings since 1996 as the rest of the world combined. Maybe, just maybe, it has more to do with our gun culture and gun laws than bad parenting per se.
Oh, for Fuck’s sake. The mild tone I chose in responding to you was inappropriate, informed by under-caffeination. You are suggesting that emotional immaturity in sexual relationships leads, somehow, to murder because bad parents and teachers. You are either an idiot, or just flat out mendacious. Though maybe both?
By the way, gun nut, STOP DOING THE TYPICAL NRA CRAP OF BLAMING TEACHERS. THEY DID NOT LIVE WITH THE KID, OR BUY THE GUNS, OR KEEP THEM UNLOCKED NOW DID THEY??? Yeah I am screaming, because I am so sick of hearing about innocent dead kids, because of selfish, ignorant, and totally irresponsible gun nut parents. Teachers are not dating police!