Orlando Harris called his lonely life ‘perfect storm for a mass shooter,’ had ammo to kill hundreds: cops
The teenage gunman who killed a teacher and a 15-year-old pupil at his old St. Louis high school left a note calling his lonely life a “perfect storm for a mass shooter” — and was armed with enough ammo to kill hundreds.
Orlando Harris, 19, left a manifesto-like note in his car before storming Central Visual and Performing Arts High School with an AR-15-style rifle and at least 600 rounds of ammo Monday, killing two and injuring seven others, police said Tuesday.
“He wrote, ‘I don’t have any friends. I don’t have any family. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve never had a social life. I’ve been an isolated loner my entire life. This was the perfect storm for a mass shooter,'” Commissioner Michael Sack said, reading from the note.
He suggested the motive was that Harris “feels isolated, he feels alone — quite possibly angry and resentful of others who have, it appeared to him, to have healthy relationships. So a desire to lash out.”
“There was no mystery about what was going to happen. He had it out and entered in an aggressive, violent manner,” Sack said.
The commissioner said Harris used an “AR-15-style rifle” — and it “appears he came into the building with more than 600 rounds of ammunition on his person.”
“This could have been a horrific scene,” Sack said. “That’s a whole lot of victims there,” he said of the mass of ammo.
“He had seven magazines of ammunition on a chest rig that he wore. He also had an additional eight magazines of ammunition in a field bag that he carried,” the chief said, showing images of the arsenal.
“This doesn’t include the number of magazines that he left and dumped on the stairway and in the corridors along the way,” Sack said.
Harris — who graduated from the school last year — had yelled “You are all going to die!” as he opened fire, terrified pupils said.
One girl said she was eye-to-eye with the shooter before his gun apparently jammed and she was able to run out.
Harris injured seven students — all aged 15 or 16 — and killed tenth-grader Alexandria Bell, 15, and 61-year-old physical education teacher Jean Kuczka before he was shot dead in a shoot-out with cops.
“Alexandria was my everything,” her father, Andre Bell, told KSDK-TV. “She was joyful, wonderful and just a great person,” he said of the dancer who was also a member of the school’s junior varsity dance team.
“She was the girl I loved to see and loved to hear from. No matter how I felt, I could always talk to her and it was alright. That was my baby,” Andre Bell said.
Abby Kuczka said her mother was killed when the gunman burst into her classroom and she moved between him and her students.
“My mom loved kids,” Abbey Kuczka told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “She loved her students. I know her students looked at her like she was their mom.”
Kuczka’s biography on the school website said she was the married mother of five and a grandmother of seven. She was an avid bike rider and was part of a 1979 national championship field hockey team at what is now Missouri State University.
“I cannot imagine myself in any other career but teaching,” Kuczka wrote on the website. “In high school, I taught swimming lessons at the YMCA. From that point on, I knew I wanted to be a teacher.”
With Post wires