Philippines school shooting leaves 3 dead, 20 wounded
Two 9th grade students opened fire inside San Jose National High School in Tacloban City. Local officials cite "systemic failures" in missing the clear warning signs of mass violence.
Three students were killed and twenty more injured after two of their classmates opened fire at San Jose National High School in central Philippines on Monday. The shooters, aged 14 and 15, fired 40 shots inside the school with two handguns. Most of the dead and wounded were female students.
“The suspects barged into two rooms because after the shooting in the first, the children scampered and the suspects apparently ran after some victims into another room,” regional police chief Brig. Gen. Jason Capoy said.
One of the attackers was arrested immediately at the school. The other fled and was arrested later in the day.
In response to the attack, the Philippines has temporarily blocked gaming app Gorebox after an initial investigation found the 14-year-old had an account despite the 18+ age verification requirements for mature and violent content. The game has maps that resemble school campuses with targets in typical civilian clothing. Per classmates, the 14-year-old was obsessed with guns and wanted to be in the military.
Police said the 14-year-old was a player of Gorebox, a game where players can “obliterate anything [they] desire” and “engage in brutal combat with an extensive arsenal of weapons and explosives”, according to its Google Play listing.
Despite illegal firearms being widely available in the Philippines and mass violence is very rare. One of the teens took a 9mm pistol from his aunt who is a police officer. It’s unclear how the second teen obtained a .38 revolver which is registered to a security agency in a nearby city.
The last shooting at a school in the Philippines was in 2022 when a man armed with pistols opened fire at a university in the Manila metropolitan area before a graduation ceremony. He killed a former Philippine town mayor with whom the suspect had a long-running feud.
Local officials say the teens were motivated by bullying. A teacher described one of the suspects as “quiet and socially withdrawn” after being held back a year due to poor academic performance.
Investigators reported finding violent videos of one of the teens firing a gun on his social media. A second photo on social media (above) shows both suspects holding handguns that appear to be the same ones used in the shooting.
“So this is very obviously red flags... we’re not putting blame on anybody, but if anybody was able to monitor these red flags, this could have been prevented” said police chief Capoy.
The 14-year-old would be exempt from criminal prosecution under a 2006 Philippine law, which sets the minimum age of 15 for a minor to be criminally liable.
David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my podcast—Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education & Security—or my interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.