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Teenage Gunman Kills 15 at School in Germany
Michael Latz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A victim’s body lay covered on Wednesday as the police recorded the scene at a secondary school in Winnenden, Germany. More Photos >
WINNENDEN, Germany — A teenage gunman killed 15 people, most of them female, on Wednesday in a rampage that began at a school near Stuttgart in southern Germany and ended in a nearby town, where he then killed himself after the police wounded him.
Students at the Albertville school in Winnenden, Germany, where a teenager began a shooting rampage on Wednesday, killing 15 people and then himself. Page A14. In Alabama, details emerged about a gunman who killed 10 and himself on Tuesday. Page A15. More Photos »
The attack left Germany, which tightened tough gun controls after a similar attack at a school seven years ago, struggling to understand the carnage that had again befallen it, a country with relatively little violent crime. In 2002, a gunman killed 16 people before killing himself at a school in Erfurt, in eastern Germany.
“This is a day of mourning for all of Germany,” Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a brief statement in Berlin. “Our thoughts are with the friends and families.”
The authorities identified the attacker as Tim Kretschmer, 17, who graduated last year from the school he later attacked, the Albertville secondary school in Winnenden, a prosperous commuter town near Stuttgart, in the state of Baden-Württemberg.State officials and the police, in news briefings throughout the day, described three hours of horror that began soon after the school day started.
They said the attacker, clad in black, opened fire in three classrooms at the school, killing nine students — eight girls and a boy — and three teachers, all women. Seven wounded students were hospitalized.
The officials said that several police officers arrived at the school two minutes after receiving an emergency call at 9:33 a.m. and that they could hear shots still being fired. The officers entered the school and caught a glimpse of the gunman, who fired one shot at them and ran. That is when he apparently encountered and killed two of the teachers, the officials said.
Mr. Kretschmer managed to leave the school and flee the grounds, shooting and killing an employee of a nearby psychiatric clinic, officials said.
Firefighters, paramedics and columns of heavily armed commandos swarmed the school and sealed off Winnenden’s small downtown area, where the attacker had been seen heading. Helicopters circled over the town of some 27,000 residents.
But the attacker slipped away, hijacking a car and forcing the driver to take him to Wendlingen, about 25 miles southeast of Stuttgart.
Inside a Volkswagen dealership there, the gunman killed an employee and a customer before police officers engaged him in a gunfight. The gunman was shot in the leg and two police officers were wounded. As the police closed in, Mr. Kretschmer shot himself in the head.
No motive had emerged by Wednesday night. “There were apparently no signs that he would be capable of something like this,” said Erwin Hetger, the state police chief.
People who knew Mr. Kretschmer described him as quiet or inconspicuous.
Adrian Homoke, 19, said the gunman seemed to be a normal enough student during his last year at Albertville, with friends and his own interests. “He liked to play poker during the breaks,” Mr. Homoke said. “I couldn’t say anything bad about him.”
Mr. Kretschmer’s father is a member of a local shooting club and owned 15 legally registered weapons, according to state officials. One of them, a pistol usually kept in a bedroom, was missing when the police searched the family home just after the shooting at the school, as were more than 100 rounds of ammunition, the police said.
Many in Germany wondered whether the attack could have had any link — in the mind of the attacker, at least — to the shooting rampage in Alabama on Tuesday that left 11 dead, including the gunman.
By nightfall, the scene around the school and in Winnenden was part media circus, part impromptu memorial.
A long concrete wall was adorned with candles, flowers and messages to the dead and their families. A Roman Catholic church held a service in the center of town that was packed with mourners, many sobbing.
Albert Biesinger, a Catholic deacon who works with the local police to counsel traumatized crime victims, said the authorities had quickly steered the surviving students and their families away from the grisly scene at the school.
“I tell them, ‘This is too much for you,’ ” the deacon said. “They couldn’t handle that right now.”
Victor Homola and Stefan Pauly contributed reporting from Berlin.
In Attacks in Germany, Gun Access and Torment
A woman and a child mourned in front of Albertville school in Winnenden, Germany, on Thursday, a day after a teenage gunman killed himself and 15 other people
WAIBLINGEN, Germany — A portrait of a troubled, depressed teenager with easy access to an unsecured pistol began to emerge Thursday, a day after the youth went on a rampage, killing 15 people before taking his own life.
By Thursday, the police had established that the teenager, Tim Kretschmer, 17, last year broke off a round of psychological counseling for depression.
Searching his bedroom, the police found violent computer games — in which, experts say, players digitally clothe and arm themselves for combat — plus brutal videos and play weapons that fire small yellow pellets, said Siegfried Mahler of the Stuttgart prosecutors’ office. And they were trying to verify the authenticity of a reported posting to a chat room in which someone warned of an attack on a school in Winnenden. The killer graduated last year from the school where the attacks took place.
Rather than speak of a specific motive, investigators described Mr. Kretschmer as a classic case of a conflicted young man who wreaked havoc in real life after savoring imaginary violence in the digital world.
“If we had known this in advance, we would have called him a prototype of a rampager,” said Erwin Hetger, the chief of police in Baden-Württemberg, the southeastern German state where the crimes took place.
The brutality of the crimes was overwhelming.
Of the 12 people Mr. Kretschmer killed at the school, 8 were girls, 3 were female teachers and one was a male student. Several were killed with carefully placed shots to the head. After killing an employee of a clinic for the mentally ill, he sprayed at least 13 rounds to kill two people at a Volkswagen dealership before turning the gun on himself.
Prosecutors said they could file criminal charges against the shooter’s parents for failing to secure the pistol that he used, as required by German law. The gun was a 9-millimeter Beretta pistol that his father kept unsecured in a bedroom; other firearms owned by his father were under lock and key, the authorities said.
After a shooting seven years ago at a school in Erfurt in the east of the country, German teachers and police officers were trained to respond to violent episodes. That training was on display minutes after the shooting began Wednesday. And on Thursday, offers of help came in from people who had experienced the aftermath of the Erfurt shooting.
But a consensus was building that even the best plans could not prevent every emergency.
“We did a lot in Germany,” said Christine Alt, director of the school in Erfurt where the shooting took place. “But it seems we will never find a recipe that is 100 percent effective.”
The Internet posting that was being investigated was reported by the father of a youth identified only as Bernd, according to the police. Bernd’s information indicated that someone on the site had written: “I have weapons and will go to my old school and really burn them up. I might get out alive, but you will certainly hear about me tomorrow. Remember the name Winnenden.”
The police appeared confident of the posting’s authenticity early in the day. Later, after the Web site that they named denied that there had been such a posting, the police said they were investigating that new information.
Some German officials said that some people always slipped through the system undetected.
“We need to recognize that there is no such thing as absolute security; that we cannot simply prevent everything,” Volker Kauder, the leader of the conservative bloc in Parliament, told German public radio. Wolfgang Schäuble, the interior minister who is in a wheelchair after being partly paralyzed by a bullet to the spine in an October 1990 assassination attempt, played down the need to tighten already tough gun laws.
But with the computer having played such a role in the young man’s life, the Winnenden shootings seem likely to renew a debate in Germany over banning violent video games.
“These games basically program the minds of young men a thousand times over,” said Alina Wilms, a psychologist involved in treating people affected by the Erfurt shooting, who advocates a ban. “If ever it were going to be possible,” she said, “then now.”
Victor Homola contributed reporting from Berlin.
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