CLEVELAND – A 14-year-old suspended student, dressed in black, opened fire in his downtown high school Wednesday, wounding four people as terrified schoolmates hid in closets and bathrooms and huddled under laboratory desks. He then killed himself.
A fellow student at SuccessTech Academy alternative school said Asa H. Coon, who was suspended for fighting two days earlier, had made threats in front of students and teachers last week.
“He’s crazy. He threatened to blow up our school. He threatened to stab everybody,” Doneisha LeVert said. “We didn’t think nothing of it.”
Armed with two revolvers, Coon fired eight shots and may have targeted teachers, said Police Chief Michael McGrath. Police found a duffel bag stocked with ammunition and three knives in a bathroom, he said.
Parents were angry that firearms got into a school equipped with metal detectors that students said were intermittently used.
Coon spent time in two juvenile facilities after a domestic-violence episode and was also given home detention, according to juvenile-court records obtained by The Plain Dealer. He was also suspended from school last year for trying to injure a student, the paper reported.
Officials said two teachers and two students were shot and that a 14-year-old girl fell and hurt her knee while running out of the school.
Witnesses said the shooter moved through the converted five-story downtown office building, working his way up through the first two floors of administrative offices to the third floor of classrooms. Officials said he was wearing a black Marilyn Manson concert shirt, black jeans and black-painted finger nails.
The first person shot, student Michael Peek, had punched Coon in the face right before the shootings began, said student Rasheem Smith, 15.
Coon “came out of the bathroom and bumped Mike, and he (Mike) punched him in his face. Mike started walking. He shot Mike in the side,” Smith said.
Peek, 14, didn’t know Coon had a gun, Smith said.
Antonio Deberry, 17, said he and his classmates hid under laboratory tables and watched the shooter move down the hallway.
“I saw him walking past. He didn’t see us, we saw him.”
Coon had been suspended since Monday for fighting near the school that day, said Charles Blackwell, president of SuccessTech’s student-parent organization.
He did not know how Coon got into the building Wednesday.
Math teacher David Kachadourian, 57, was in good condition; Michael Grassie, a 42-year-old teacher, was in surgery, but his condition was unavailable. The other two injured teens were taken to a children’s hospital, which would not release their names, ages or conditions.
