Woman Kills Boy, Wounds 5 at Illinois School; Is Found Dead

A young woman wielding three handguns strode into a second-grade classroom in this quiet suburb north of Chicago on Friday and opened fire on the children, leaving an 8-year-old boy dead and five schoolmates wounded, four of them critically.

The woman, identified by police as Lori Wasserman Dann, 30, then ran from the Hubbard Woods Elementary School and shot and wounded Philip Andrew, 20, as he tried to disarm her when she entered his family’s home, only a few hundred yards away.

Winnetka police, converging on the area, found Andrew’s distraught mother, Ruth, shouting: “There’s a woman with a gun in my house.”

Police quickly sealed off the home at 2 Kent Road, but for hours delayed storming the house. When a heavily armed SWAT team finally entered, shortly after 7 p.m., the officers found Dann dead in a room on the second floor, where she reportedly had shot herself in the head. Police said they had heard no shots from within the house.

Talked to Parents

Winnetka Police Chief Herbert Timm said the woman, who lived in adjacent Glencoe, had talked by telephone to her parents and admitted her role in the shootings, saying she was sorry. But, he said, when police with bullhorns called for her to surrender she never responded.

Before going to the school, police said, Dann allegedly set fire to a home about eight blocks away where she had been working as a housekeeper. She reportedly was upset, having been told she was losing her job because the family was moving, police said.

Commander Randy Walters, chief of detectives for the neighboring Northbrook Police Department, one of a dozen agencies working with Winnetka authorities under mutual-assistance agreements, said it was unclear why the woman had selected the second-grade class at the school, which has students from kindergarten through fifth grade.

“There was blood all over the classroom and desks knocked over,” one policeman said.

During the day, on the chance that the gun-toting woman was still at large, school officials kept the remaining children at the 300-pupil school inside, under police protection, until each could be released to parents. Special psychological counseling will be provided to the children starting today, they said.

8-Year-Old Dies

Eight-year-old Nicholas B. Corwin died from a gunshot wound to his body, shortly after being taken to nearby Highland Park Hospital. Peter Munro, also 8, was reported in serious but stable condition at the same hospital. Philip Andrew, the 20-year-old who was shot in his family’s home, also was reported in stable condition at Highland Park.

Four other children were in critical condition at Evanston Hospital, each with a single shot to the body, according to a hospital spokesman, Dr. David Winchester. Winchester said he was optimistic about their chances of surviving, even though one of them, Lindsay Clark Fisher, 8, had arrived with so little blood that doctors immediately performed a relatively rare transfusion directly into her heart.

Also at Evanston were Robert Trossman, 6, Mark Tebourek, 8, and Kathryn Miller, 7. All were in intensive care following surgery.

According to sketchy accounts provided by police, Lori Dann apparently appeared early Friday morning at the Winnetka home of a family whose children she had cared for until recently. She reportedly locked two young children and their mother in the basement and set off “an incendiary device,” but they were able to escape and call authorities before the house was extensively damaged by the flames.

About 15 minutes later, Dann appeared at Hubbard Woods school, where a third child of the family was a pupil. The boy, however, was away from the school on a field trip.

Armed with three hand guns, Dann went into the boys’ lavatory, where she shot one child. Then she burst into a second-grade classroom.

One witness told Associated Press that she said: “Kids, I’m going to teach you something about guns. Line up against the wall,” before randomly firing at them.

Police recovered a .357-magnum revolver from the school, for which Timm said Dann had been issued a permit.

After shooting the five children, Dann next appeared at the Andrew home at about 11 a.m., where she shot Philip Andrew. Other members of the household--Andrew’s mother, grandfather and a nurse--safely fled the house.

After Dann’s death had been discovered, Highland Park police disclosed that earlier in the day she had attempted to set a fire at Ravinia School in that community. They said she had also appeared at a day-care center, carrying a jar of gasoline, but had left without incident after being challenged.

Timm said Dann had a history of emotional instability. According to preliminary reports, she apparently had once attacked her former husband with an ice pick. Police in Madison, Wis., said they had once arrested her for stealing merchandise from a department store. And the FBI said she had attempted to extort money from an Arizona physician.

Timm said that authorities in Madison had found a stolen nurses uniform and literature on poisons in an apartment Dann had recently vacated.

Police said they had originally decided to delay attempting to search the Andrew home for the suspect after discovering her car parked near the school and finding “incendiary devices”--liquid-filled jars with wicks--as well as an identity card and ammunition.

Police had said earlier they assumed Dann was not at large--meaning she must be in the sealed-off house, alive or dead. Walters added, however, that the sound of a single shot heard in the early afternoon had come from the accidental discharge of an officer’s pistol.

Winnetka is an affluent North Shore suburb. As news of the shooting spread, trading activity at the Chicago Board of Trade dropped significantly because many traders left the floor in mid-session to go home to check on the safety of their own children.