Gunman Opens Fire at School in Brazil, Killing 12 Children
Victor R. Caivano/Associated Press Police guarded the perimeter of a school in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday after a gunman opened fire, killing at least 12 people.
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: April 7, 2011
RIO DE JANEIRO — As family members mourned their loved ones and kept vigil at hospitals for the injured, this city searched for understanding Thursday after a shooting at a public school left 12 students dead and 12 others wounded.
Enlarge This Image
Ricardo Moraes/Reuters
A woman with a photo of her niece, a student at a Rio de Janeiro school attacked by a gunman, waited for news on Thursday.
Enlarge This Image
Marcelo Sayao/European Pressphoto Agency
A wounded boy was taken to a hospital after a mass shooting at a school in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday.
Brazil is no stranger to urban violence, especially the kind of violence in gang-controlled slums that have given this city one of the highest murder rates in the world. But the specter of the schoolhouse massacre was thought to be a mostly American affliction.
On Thursday, the Tasso da Silveira elementary and middle school, a three-story aqua-and-yellow schoolhouse in the working-class neighborhood of Realengo, on the west side of Rio, joined the ranks of Columbine High School in 1999 and Virginia Tech University in 2007, sites of other school shootings. For the victims’ families, the massacre brought those tragedies home.
“We hear about terrorists abroad and we think it will never happen here,” said Clemilson Perreira Chagas, 30, whose cousin Jessica Perreira, 15, was killed Thursday. “But it does.”
The police said that Wellington Menezes de Oliveira, 24, entered Tasso de Silveira around 8 a.m. A former student at the school, Mr. Oliveira told a teacher who recognized him that he was there to speak to a class.
Minutes later, with an ammunition belt strapped to his waist and a .38-caliber pistol in one hand and a .32-caliber gun in the other, he opened fire wildly in two first-floor classrooms. The classroom walls are covered with bullet holes from the shots that missed, the police said.
The children began running and trying to hide. A boy who was wounded fled the school and found a police officer nearby, officials said.
The officer, Sgt. Marcio Alves, saw Mr. Oliveira leaving a classroom and ordered him to drop the guns. Mr. Oliveira ignored the order and began climbing a staircase to more classrooms, Sergeant Alves recounted later. Sergeant Alves shot, hitting the gunman in the leg.
Mr. Oliveira then shot himself in the head.
During the attack, having stopped to reload twice, Mr. Oliveira killed 10 girls and 2 boys, ages 12 to 14. They died from bullet wounds mostly to the head and chest, said Martha Rocha, the chief of Rio’s Civil Police.
A letter found in Mr. Oliveira’s pocket made it clear that the attack was premeditated, and that he intended to die, but it offered no motive for the shootings.
Instead, he left explicit instructions for his burial — he wanted to be near his adopted mother, who died in 2009 — and the disposition of his house, which he wanted to donate to an animal shelter. He asked to be buried in a way that reflected some aspects of Islamic tradition, including in a white sheet he said he left in a bag on the first floor of the school, but he also asked Jesus for eternal life.
In the only reference to his deed, he sought “God’s forgiveness for what I have done.”
A longtime neighbor and former member of Mr. Oliveira’s church said Mr. Oliveira had been a lifelong Jehovah’s Witness before turning to Islam two years ago. Other neighbors on the street where he grew up said he had few friends and spent many hours in front of his computer on social networking sites. In the past year, several said, he had taken to wearing black clothing.
“People thought it was strange when he began wearing black, but we could never imagine he was going to do something like this,” said Fabio Santos, 27, who said he knew him for more than 10 years. “Maybe it was because his mother and grandmother had died.”
After his mother died, he and his father moved away. It was around that time that he left his job as a warehouse manager for a food exporter, Mr. Santos said. Mr. Oliveira came back to the Realengo house alone now and again, neighbors said.
“He was a very lonely person,” said Elda Lira, 55, a neighbor who said she had known him since he was a baby. “He was always isolated and in his own world.”
Sérgio Cabral, Rio’s governor, called him an “animal and psychopath.”
Mr. Cabral has been at the heart of efforts to reduce gun violence in Rio ahead of the city’s twin billing on the world stage — the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. But those efforts have been focused on clearing out violent drug gangs from some of Rio’s most dangerous slums, not on securing schools from armed former students.
Brazil has also been struggling to contain the flow of arms that feed the violence.
With students and family members in a state of shock, Eduardo Paes, Rio’s mayor, said the school would remain closed on Friday.
But family members of the victims questioned whether the school should ever reopen.
“I heard there was blood splattered all over the school,” said Bianca Assis, 24, whose cousin Edson Clayton, 14, was among the wounded. “What mother will allow her child to ever go back there?” As a minimum, she said, the state needed to provide more security in the schools.
“If the school continues to be open” to unchecked visitors, “these kinds of things will continue to happen,” Ms. Assis said. “Today we had dead people, tomorrow we will have rapes.”
Friends and family members huddled outside the Albert Schweitzer Hospital on Thursday, waiting anxiously for news, as surgeons inside treated wounded students.
By early afternoon, news of the shooting had spread throughout the country, shocking officials. President Dilma Rousseff became visibly emotional at an event in Brasília when she asked those present to observe a minute of silence for the “defenseless children” in Realengo.
“This type of crime is not characteristic of our country,” she said. “All of us here, men and women, are united to repudiate this type of violence.”
Reporting was contributed by Roberta Nápolis from Rio, Myrna Domit from São Paulo, and J. David Goodman and Sergio Peçanha from New York.