14-Year-Old Girl Shoots Classmate at School

As students gathered for lunch Wednesday, a 14-year-old girl allegedly opened fire on another eighth-grader in the cafeteria of a Roman Catholic school here.

Hours after the shooting, 13-year-old Kimberly Marchese was in stable condition with a shoulder wound.

The name of the teenage shooting suspect was not released, but a City Hall employee described her as “a petite, little blond girl with glasses--in leg irons.”

Police said the assault followed a long-standing feud between the two girls.

“This is a situation of a student who was upset with another student,” Williamsport Police Officer David Ritter said. “This is not a random act of violence and, as far as I understand, there are no other targets.”

A nun who knew the shooting victim when she attended the parochial elementary school a few blocks away said Kimberly was a “nice girl” who was well-liked.

The shooting came just two days after two boys were shot dead and 13 people wounded at Santana High School in Santee, Calif.

Wednesday’s attack was the first school shooting by a female student since 1979, and the first such incident at a parochial school since 1995.

The suspect was in custody within four minutes of the shooting at Bishop Neumann Junior-Senior High School here, authorities said.

Police said fellow student Brent Paucke, 14, persuaded the girl to drop the gun. Paucke told police that he ducked under a lunchroom table when the suspect came in screaming and fired two shots. Paucke, a freshman, said he recognized the girl from his school bus.

“She was saying: ‘I don’t want to live. I should just commit suicide right here.’ And she pointed the gun at her head,” Paucke said Wednesday. “I got up and started talking to her. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

Paucke said the girl pointed the gun at him from about five feet away, and his principal told him to back away. He said he continued to talk because he didn’t want more people to be hurt.

Ritter called Paucke “very courageous.”

“We were very proud that a student would take such a serious risk,” the officer said at a news conference.

It is not known where the suspect obtained the weapon, described only as a handgun.

The two-story school building was evacuated until police determined that no one else had been involved in the assault.

When news of the shooting spread, parents called in a panic and rushed to a local church to take their children home. Even some parents of the grade school students chose to take them out of class, upset and frightened by the events at the nearby campus.

Michael R. Rafferty, mayor of the town of 30,000 people in central Pennsylvania, said he told parents and students that “there were no indications that there was any grand conspiracy to do anything more than deal with a personal grievance.” (Williamsport is the home of the Little League World Series, held annually in August.)

Officials at Bishop Neumann Junior-Senior High canceled classes today at the 231-student campus, although counselors were scheduled to be on hand for students who wanted to talk.

School violence experts said the shooting of one girl by another was unusual, but not entirely surprising.

“We’re teaching violence in our society and we’re making lethal weapons available to young people--a combination that is not to be sustained,” said Heather Johnston Nichol, director of research for Girls Inc., a nonprofit youth organization. “Girls, after all, are people. And many of these responses are human.”

Psychologist Angela Browne of the Harvard School of Public Health said the apparent nature of the crime was consistent with what often happens when girls resort to violence.

“With girls, it’s usually about an interaction with one other person,” Browne said. “It’s much less likely to be random than with boys.”

Criminal justice professor James Alan Fox of Boston’s Northeastern University said the timing of the incident, two days after the California shooting, was noteworthy.

“It’s really a case of contagion,” Fox said. “There’s been bullying ever since there’s been schools. There’s been angry teenagers as long as there’s been teenagers. But what’s different now is that the notion of taking a gun to school to settle one’s problems comes quickly to mind from many alienated, angry, disgruntled students.”

By nightfall Wednesday, the brick school, the exterior of which is adorned with a metal cross, seemed to be back to normal--no police tape or extra security presence. The only signs that something unusual had happened were the half-dozen television satellite trucks parked across the street.

In the basement cafeteria where the shooting took place, tables were pushed to the center and chairs stacked high.

A sign on the wall read: “Experience the Neumann difference.”

Through the stained glass windows of the school chapel a candle flickered and burned.

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Mehren reported from Boston and Garvey from Williamsport.