Sev­enth-day Adven­tist school where two kids were wound­ed was like­ly reli­gious tar­get: Sher­iff

On Wednes­day after­noon, a gun­man opened fire at Feath­er Riv­er Adven­tist School in Butte Coun­ty, wound­ing two kinder­garten­ers before he took his own life. 

“We were going in for lunch recess, and basi­cal­ly every­body in my class­room heard shoot­ing, and most peo­ple were scream­ing,” sixth grad­er Joce­lyn Orlan­do told CBS News Sacra­men­to. “We all went into the office, we closed the cur­tains, locked the doors, basi­cal­ly did what we would do in a school shoot­ing, and then one of the teach­ers came, and we all ran into the gym.”

Fol­low­ing the attack on the reli­gious school, Butte Coun­ty Sher­iff Kony Honea said author­i­ties had “received some infor­ma­tion that leads us to believe that the sub­ject respon­si­ble for the shoot­ing tar­get­ed this school because of its affil­i­a­tion with the Sev­enth-day Adven­tist Church.” 

“Whether or not this is a hate crime or whether or not it’s part of some sort of larg­er scheme at this point. I don’t have enough infor­ma­tion to pro­vide an answer to that,” he con­tin­ued. 

Approx­i­mate­ly 35 stu­dents attend the tiny north­ern Cal­i­for­nia K‑8 school locat­ed in Paler­mo.

Police revealed Wednes­day that two boys enrolled in the school’s kinder­garten who were injured are in “extreme­ly crit­i­cal con­di­tion.” 

“I am thank­ful that they’re still alive, but they’ve got a long road ahead of them,” Honea said.

The shoot­er, whose iden­ti­ty has not yet been released, had no known con­nec­tion to the school. 

The FBI has launched an inves­ti­ga­tion into the inci­dent, say­ing in a press con­fer­ence that it is “doing an entire work-up of the sub­ject, to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of his moti­va­tion, ide­ol­o­gy.”

Gov. Gavin New­som (D‑CA) put out a state­ment on X say­ing the com­mu­ni­ty had been “shat­tered by sense­less gun vio­lence.”

Assem­bly­man James Gal­lagher, a top Repub­li­can law­mak­er in the state whose area includes Butte Coun­ty, said his “heart is break­ing for every­one impact­ed by this tragedy” and called for more armed offi­cers at every school in an X post.

A shoot­ing last year that took place at a small Chris­t­ian school in Ten­nessee also raised ques­tions about whether it was tar­get­ed because of its reli­gious affil­i­a­tion. Author­i­ties have not yet come to a final con­clu­sion on the motive behind the Covenant School shoot­ing, in which six peo­ple were killed.

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How­ev­er, Sen. Josh Haw­ley (R‑MO) is among the law­mak­ers who have described the mas­sacre as a “hate crime.”

“A crime that accord­ing to Nashville police, specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed, that’s their word, tar­get­ed, the mem­bers of this Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty, the mem­bers of this reli­gious insti­tu­tion,” he said in a press release in 2023.