An Iowa teenager who shot and killed one student and injured five other people had been bullied since elementary school and was devastated when his younger sister began to experience the same.
Dylan Butler, 17, who was a senior at Perry High School, opened fire on Thursday morning, shooting dead a sixth grader who attended Perry’s Middle School. He then turned the gun on himself.
Students, Yesenia Roeder and Khamya Hall, both 17, alongside their mother, Alita, told police that Butler, their late classmate, had been bullied relentlessly since elementary school.
That escalated recently, they told AP, when his younger sister started getting picked on, too.
Officials at the school didn’t intervene, they said, and that was ‘the last straw’ for the shooter.
‘He was hurting. He got tired. He got tired of the bullying. He got tired of the harassment,’ Yesenia Roeder Hall, 17, said.
‘Was it a smart idea to shoot up the school? No. God, no.’
Butler was armed with a pump-action shotgun and handgun, both of which are illegal for a 17-year-old to obtain in Iowa. He also had a rudimentary explosive device, which was undetonated and was later rendered safe by fire marshals.
The 17-year-old died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound by the time first responders arrived at the school, shortly after 7.40am.
One of the five people injured was the school’s principal, Dan Marburger, who was rushed to hospital and is currently in surgery for his gunshot wounds.
The other four people injured were students. Of the five, one is in critical condition, although police did not confirm if this was the principal or a student.
Hours before the shooting took place at 7:37 am, Butler posted a TikTok posing in what appeared to be the school bathroom, with the caption: ‘Now we wait.’
Butler posted the TikTok selfie with the song ‘Stray Bullet’ playing in the background.
In December, just weeks before the shooting, Butler posted another video on the same social media account of him sitting on children’s playground equipment with a friend, pretending to be in a gunfight using sticks.
Butler gets ‘shot’ by the stick, and falls down the children’s slide.
On Thursday morning, there were hundreds of emergency services at the scene, which is 25 miles northwest of Des Moines. Ambulances, police units, air ambulances, and firefighters were called to the school at 7.37am.
The Dallas County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the shooting, which happened on the first day of classes. The FBI Omaha Des Moines was on the scene, as was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive.
County Sherriff Adam Infante said at a press conference at 11 am that police officers arrived at the high school seven minutes after the first call was made.
The first responders found ‘multiple gunshot victims’ inside the school – and at a press conference at 3pm, police confirmed the number of injured was five.
