Teen Fatally Shot Outside School

A 16-year-old high school student waiting for school to open was shot to death by a former student Friday in the latest act of violence in and around U.S. schools, authorities said.

Police said the victim, Neal Boyd IV, an average-to-above-average student at Lew Wallace High School with no disciplinary problems, was targeted by 17-year-old suspect Donald Burt Jr., who pulled out a gun and shot him in the head as other students stood by in a parking lot.

Burt, who was expelled from the school last year for failing to attend class, was unarmed when apprehended a few blocks away at a relative’s home.

The suspect admitted shooting Boyd and told authorities where he hid the gun, police said.

“It appears that he [victim] was targeted because . . . the suspect shot the student and walked away,” Gary Supt. Mary Guinn said. “If there had been a desire to shoot someone else, he would have.”

“It was a one-on-one incident. Basically what happened, the 17-year-old walked up to the 16-year-old and put a gun to his head and fired one shot,” Police Chief John Roby said. “I guess the fortunate thing about it is that there was only a small crowd around.”

Burt, whose alleged motive was still unclear, was arrested on suspicion of murder, a city spokeswoman said. He will be charged as an adult, Roby said.

The shooting happened before classes began. The school’s roughly 1,000 students were sent home for the day.

Police said there had been two or three shootings in and around Lew Wallace High School in recent years.

In 1999, a 15-year-old girl was struck in the head by a stray bullet as she walked home from school. In 1997, a spectator was killed and two others were hurt in a gang-related shooting at the homecoming game, and a student was shot in the face during commencement exercises.

“I wish all this shooting would stop,” the victim’s father, Neal Boyd III, told reporters.

Guinn said the alleged gunman had stopped coming to school about a year and a half ago. Guinn said the victim was a quiet student who was taking college preparatory classes.

“We all began to search ourselves to see if there’s anything we could have done, anything we missed. We don’t believe there’s anything we could have done different to avoid this,” Guinn said.

Gary, a city of more than 100,000 near Chicago, has a reputation for high crime and high poverty rates. It had the top per-capita murder rate in the United States in the early 1990s, although the number of murders has fallen by half in recent years.

But the Glen Park neighborhood surrounding the school has seen its share of crime, local activist Dena Holland-Neal said.

School shootings have increased in the United States in recent years, although most of the shootings have been in suburban school districts and not at urban schools.

Since a deadly attack at a school in Santee, Calif., on March 5, there have been a number of threats.

In Santee, a 15-year-old student allegedly killed two classmates, the worst incident of U.S. school violence since two teenagers killed 15 people, including themselves, at Columbine High School in Colorado in April 1999.

Last week, an 18-year-old allegedly opened fire at his school in El Cajon, Calif., injuring at least 10 people.