Gunman who shot 2 kindergartners at a California school wrote about attack targeting children

OROVILLE, Calif. (AP) — A gunman who critically wounded two kindergartners at a tiny religious school in Northern California was mentally ill and believed by targeting children he was carrying out “counter-measures” in response to America’s involvement in Middle East violence, a sheriff said Thursday.

Glenn Litton used a “ruse” of pretending to enroll a fictitious grandson to gain entry to the Feather River School of Seventh-Day Adventists in Oroville, Butte County Sheriff Kory L. Honea said during a news conference.

Litton used a handgun to shoot two kindergarten boys, ages 5 and 6, who remained in critical condition Thursday, the sheriff said. Litton then used the weapon — a so-called ghost gun, which is difficult for investigators to trace — to kill himself just yards (meters) from the school’s playground.

While Honea said Litton, 56, also had a lengthy criminal history — mostly theft and identity theft — authorities said they did not find any violent crimes on his record.

Honea said the man is believed to have targeted the Feather River School in Wednesday’s attack, though it’s unclear why. Litton had attended a school of Seventh-Day Adventists in another town as a child, the sheriff said, and he possibly had a relative who attended Feather River as a young child.

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But in Litton’s writings, the sheriff said, the suspect wrote about taking “counter-measures” against the school in response to America’s involvement in violence in the Middle East.

“That’s a motivation that was in his mind. How it was that he conflated what’s going on in Palestine and Yemen with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, I can’t speculate. I’m not sure that we’ll ever know that,” Honea said.

He said Litton had similarly scheduled an appointment at another Seventh-Day Adventist school, set for Thursday.

The Seventh-Day Adventist Church is a Christian denomination in which members consider the Bible their only creed and believe that the second coming of Christ is near. The shooting occurred shortly after 1 p.m. Wednesday at the private K-8 school with fewer than three dozen students in Oroville, on the edge of the tiny community of Palermo, about 65 miles (105 kilometers) north of Sacramento.

Law enforcement officials have documented Litton’s history of mental illness back to when he was a teenager, though Honea said investigators have not found a concrete diagnosis.

In recent years, Litton searched online for guns and explosives and wrote notes to himself to plan a non-specific mass incident, though Butte County District Attorney Michael L. Ramsey said they were “just ruminations.” Litton was a convicted felon and therefore could not legally possess a firearm.

The sheriff said the 6-year-old suffered two gunshot wounds that caused internal injuries, while the 5-year-old was shot once.

“The fact that they are currently still with us is a miracle,” Honea said of the children, adding they will likely face additional surgeries and “have a very long road ahead of them, in terms of recovery.”

Honea said the gunman was dropped off by an Uber driver for the fake meeting with a school administrator.

Following the shooting, the gunman’s body was found near the slide and other playground equipment on school grounds, which abut ranchland where cattle graze. A handgun was found nearby, Honea said.

The school was closed Thursday but sheriff’s deputies walked around the campus behind shuttered gates and staff members carried classroom items out to their cars.

Shawn Webber, an Oroville city councilmember, said the region was reeling.

“When you see this on the news or nationally and it’s like, those things don’t happen here. Well, yesterday it happened here,” he said Thursday. “It just absolutely violated the peace of our community.”

A candlelight vigil is planned for Friday.

It was the the latest among dozens of school shootings around the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut, Parkland, Florida, and Uvalde, Texas. The shootings have set off fervent gun control debates and frayed the nerves of parents whose children have grown accustomed to doing active shooter drills in their classrooms.

But the shootings have done little to move the needle on national gun laws. Firearms were the leading cause of death among children in 2020 and 2021, according to KFF, a nonprofit that researches health care issues.

“We know that the close-knit Feather River community will be grieving for a long time, as will the rest of our conference,” said Laurie Trujillo, a spokesperson for the Northern California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

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Dazio reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press journalists Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire, Hallie Golden in Seattle and Christopher Weber in Los Angeles contributed.