Scot Gunman Kills 16 Children, Teacher

A disgraced scoutmaster carrying four handguns and a grudge marched into the gymnasium of an elementary school here Wednesday and opened fire on a class of first-graders at play. He killed 16 children ages 5 and 6, their teacher and himself. A dozen other students and a second teacher were wounded.

Tragedy came to the tight-knit village of Dunblane with no warning and no explanation.

“It sounded like a hammer being hit quickly, one blow after another,” said an 11-year-old boy who heard the shots from an adjoining classroom.

Police said the shooting continued for two or three minutes.

Still piecing together the tragedy early today, police said there were apparently 29 students and two teachers in the gym when the killer burst in. One child escaped uninjured. Two children from the class were home sick.

The killer, known locally as an avid photographer and gun enthusiast, reportedly picked off his targets systematically, one at a time.

Then, police said, with the dead and wounded children around him, 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton shot himself, dying instantly.

“The attack was totally random. We are unaware of any motive,” a police spokesman said.

While Hamilton apparently held a deep grudge against scouting organizations that had expelled him from their fold, it was unclear why he took out his frustrations on the children of Dunblane.

Their reconstruction is incomplete, but police say Hamilton may have begun shooting before he reached the gym about 9:30 a.m.

“The incident started in the playground and continued inside the school. I think several people saw him. I don’t think they had the opportunity to challenge him,” Chief Superintendent Louis Munn told a news conference late Wednesday.

“Everybody involved in this inquiry is extremely distressed,” Munn said. “It is a horrific incident, unprecedented in Scotland.”

“I can only describe what I saw . . . as a medieval vision of hell,” paramedic John McEwan told the Sun, a London tabloid. “There were little bodies in piles, dotted around the room, and items of children’s clothing like shoes and pumps around the floor.”

Hamilton was described by acquaintances as an unpopular loner, a bachelor who in the 1980s sponsored boys’ athletic clubs.

He lived in a small, ground-floor apartment in public housing in the neighboring village of Stirling.

Neighbors told police that Hamilton was quiet, private, a bit weird. He had few visitors.

One neighbor told reporters that he particularly favored pictures of young boys, though she herself had never seen them.

Acquaintances said Hamilton was still rankled at having been dismissed as a scoutmaster more than 20 years ago after allegations of improper behavior around children.

By one account, he had written to Queen Elizabeth II just last week complaining of a campaign against him to ruin his reputation.

Boy Scout officials said Hamilton had been dropped after eight months in 1973-74, and that his subsequent applications to rejoin had been denied.

“This is a slaughter of the innocents, unlike anything we have ever seen in Scotland,” Helen Liddell, a Scottish member of Parliament, said of the killings.

Dunblane’s horror brought widespread incomprehension and national mourning.

“I share the grief and horror of the whole country,” the queen said.

For hours under the unblinking eye of television cameras, parents in anxious knots stood despairingly in bitter cold at police barriers outside the 700-student school, waiting to know the fate of their “wee bairns.”

The Rev. Moira Herkes, one of the school’s chaplains, recalled her horror arriving at the school gates to find “several hundred bewildered, frightened parents.”

Once the wounded children had been taken to a hospital, teachers and the principal were asked to help identify the dead.

“The staff was very, very strong,” Herkes said.

Children were kept in their classes until they could be safely dismissed to their parents.

Parents whose children were felled in the gymnasium were individually told at a home nearby and then led into the school by police.

Heads bare, tears flowing, villagers stood in silence as a wrenching cavalcade of hearses carried away the victims after dark Wednesday.

By nightfall, dozens of social workers and psychologists were working with local clergy to council students, parents, relatives and police officers.

The shock reverberated across Britain, where not even police routinely carry guns but where school safety is an increasingly important issue.

“If it can happen in Dunblane, it can happen anywhere,” said a church worker in the prosperous commuters’ village of 7,300 built around a 13th century cathedral about 40 miles northwest of Edinburgh.

The dead teacher was Gwen Mayor, 44, the mother of two grown daughters.

All five town doctors, a dozen ambulances from nearby hospitals and a helicopter rushed to the school when disbelieving police relayed the first reports.

In the gymnasium “we just worked on auto-pilot and got on with it,” pediatrician Jack Beattie said.

Police said 15 students died at the school and one in a hospital; two boys were in intensive care early today.

“I just happened to walk into the school, and someone told me that a man had gone mad in the gym,” said one mother after being told her daughter was safe. “I felt relieved, and I felt guilty that I was relieved.”