April 10 (UPI/Gephardt Daily) — San Bernadino police have released the names of the man and woman who died in a murder-suicide in a city elementary school, and revealed that one of the students critically injured in the murder-suicide has died.
Cedric Anderson, 53, of Riverside, entered the special-needs classroom of his wife, teacher Karen Elaine Smith, also 53, and shot her dead, said Jarrod Burguan, San Bernardino Police Chief said. Anderson later took his own life.
Two students in the classroom, who were standing next to Smith, were critically injured by gunfire. By Monday afternoon, one of them, 8-year-old Jonathan Martinez, had died at the hospital. Information about the other injured student has not been released.
The shooting started just before 10:30 a.m. local time inside a classroom at North Park Elementary School in San Bernardino, 55 miles due east of downtown Los Angeles. Police and emergency personnel responded to the incident within minutes.
The students shot were near the teacher when the shooting started, officials said.
“I was in my class and my teacher was teaching us a lesson, and then I heard three gun shots,” third-grader Jaidyn Stanley, 9, said. “My teacher told us to get on the ground. Then we started hearing sirens.
“There was a lot of people in my class crying and they were scared. They thought the shooter was going to come in the classroom.”
The woman who died was the spouse or girlfriend of the gunman, police said. Before he went to the classroom, the perpetrator first checked in with school officials, according to investigators.
Students at the school were evacuated to the nearby campus of Cal State San Bernardino, where they were picked up by their parents.
A number of parents were visibly flustered at the scene as they awaited the arrivals of their children.
“You could see the stress on their face but most of the kids were smiling. I guess they didn’t know what was going on,” parent Lewis Roman told a reporter.
“I came [to San Bernardino] because they said it was safer, more isolated. But I guess it’s not that way,” parent David Zamudio told the Los Angeles Times.
Authorities from the San Bernardino Police Department, California Highway Patrol, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office and school police responded to the shootings.
“My heart and prayers go out to the victims of today’s horrible act in San Bernardino and to the whole North Park Elementary School community,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a statement. “I ask everyone to join me in keeping the victims and all those impacted by today’s senseless violence in your prayers.”
North Park Elementary is just seven miles northwest of the city’s Inland Regional Center, where 14 people were killed in a domestic terrorist attack in December 2015. The city saw a 41 percent increase in homicides in 2016, the deadliest year in more than two decades.
