When is a shooting on school premises not really a “school shooting”? When that shooting occurs outside of a school involving individuals unconnected with the school and when no students or teachers are harmed.
That is the gist of a “school shooting” that occurred Tuesday morning outside an elementary school in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, Kansas which stemmed from an argument over tools between several construction workers installing turf on the playground.
According to KMBC, the shooting on the playground of the Sunrise Point Elementary School occurred around 9 am and left two workers critically wounded. Both injured workers were rushed to a nearby hospital but one of them later died from the gunshots.
No students were in the building at the time of the incident, but it and all other schools in the Blue Valley School District were locked down as a precaution.
Following the shooting, the shooter made several attempts at carjacking a vehicle in the nearby vicinity to make his escape, eventually commandeering a GMC Denali SUV, which the shooter then inexplicably drove to that vehicle’s owners home address.
The shooter was eventually taken into custody and charged with first degree premeditated murder. He was identified as 32-year-old Anthony D. Grable. The murder victim’s name has yet to be released and he was identified only as the 47-year-old father of three children.
According to The Kansas City Star, the shooter was discovered after fleeing the scene in the stolen Denali when police took the Denali’s owner to her home and surprisingly spotted the stolen vehicle in the driveway.
“It’s weird,” Overland Park Police spokesman John Lacy said of the shooter driving the carjacked vehicle to the carjacking victim’s home without the victim having been kidnapped. “I’ve never seen anything like that in 25 years in law enforcement.”
A SWAT team was called in and the murderer attempted to escape once more, only to be captured by police in a neighbor’s yard and placed under arrest. He made one last futile attempt at escape while being transported to the jail for booking.
The standoff at the house lasted about two hours and involved personnel from several different law enforcement agencies, such as Overland Park Police, Johnson County Sheriff’s Office, Kansas Highway Patrol, federal ATF agents and even federal marshals.
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Thankfully there were no children at the school when this tragic shooting incident took place, but we nevertheless pray for the well-being of the victims of the shooting as well as the suspect’s carjacking victims.
This shooting near a school, tragic as it truly is, doesn’t fit the definition of either a “mass shooting” or a “school shooting,” so it will be interesting to see how, or even if, it is covered by the biased anti-gun liberal media.