The ninth grader was sent home on March 15, and a test showed he had used drugs. He returned to the school on March 16, encountered the school director in a stairwell and pumped several bullets into him, then fired several times at his own head, the police said.
Both the student and the 57-year-old director suffered life-threatening head wounds and were taken to hospitals by helicopter, authorities said. The names of the student and the director were not made public.
The shooting is just the latest in a string of school violence in Germany, shocking a nation unaccustomed to such violent crimes and prompting calls for tightening already strict gun laws.
In the past, Germans read about the wave of school shootings in the United States, but believed it couldn’t happen there. But in November, a 16-year-old boy killed four people in a shooting spree in an Alpine Bavarian town, then shot himself. That same month, a 15-year-old student fatally stabbed his teacher 22 times with a kitchen knife because he said he hated her.
Meanwhile, international news services are reporting on violence in French schools that includes bombings, assaults on students, teachers and school workers and extortion rackets. The Washington Post Foreign Service called it an "epidemic" and Associated Press labeled it a "wave of violence."
The violence is not limited to inner city schools, but spreads across the country and into suburban bourgeois communities.
Segolene Royal, a deputy education minister, said the problems have been increasing this past winter, but that there is more openness about problems and more concerted campaigns throughout France to educate communities about the problems. She added, "Society is more violent, and schools always reveal what’s happening outside."
Royal promised a national awareness campaign teaching children how to report violence and parents to recognize signs that their children are being victimized.