Madison Grieves as Residents Await More Information on School Attack

Officials in Wisconsin gave little new information on Tuesday about a shooting that left a student and a teacher dead and six others injured.

Residents of Madison were mourning on Tuesday after the attack at Abundant Life Christian School that one day earlier left a teenage student and a teacher dead and six other people injured. The shooter, identified by the police as a 15-year-old female student, also died.

City officials provided little new information on Tuesday, and the police chief, Shon F. Barnes, did not take questions at an afternoon news conference. As a makeshift memorial grew on a sidewalk outside the school, families were left wondering how something so terrible could happen at the tightknit private school that they sought out for its academics and Christian values.

“It becomes a real community, a family in a sense,” said Michael Skalitzky, who has three grandsons enrolled at Abundant Life. “I just could never visualize that happening in that school.”

Plans for a vigil and a prayer service took shape on Tuesday as community members prayed for the families who lost their loved ones and for the recovery of the surviving victims, including four who remained hospitalized. City officials did not name the two people who died.

“It is absolutely none of y’all’s business who was harmed in this incident,” Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said.

A day after he led multiple news conferences that were free-flowing in nature, Chief Barnes walked out of Tuesday’s event after delivering a brief statement. It “appears that the motive was a combination of factors,” he said, but he did not specify what those factors were. As to whether individuals were targeted in the attack, he said, “everyone was targeted in this incident, and everyone was put in equal danger.”