Following a shooting incident at a school in the Helsinki suburb of Vantaa on Tuesday morning, the CRUX NEWS reports, that students and parents stated that teachers closed the doors to the classrooms to protect their students.
Police believe that at around nine in the morning, while classes were starting at the Viertola Comprehensive School in a quiet neighborhood close to the capital, a twelve-year-old boy shot and killed a fellow student and gravely injured two more.
When the police finally decided it was safe to allow the kids out at 12:15 local time, more than 100 anxious parents had to wait outside the school for hours. Some of the kids were crying with relief as their parents gave them embraces.
Samuela Anno, 35, was one of the parents, and he hurried to the school to fetch her 9-year-old son.
She said, “He sent me a message, at around 09:30, that mommy, everything is okay, I’m okay, our teachers are reading us books but I didn’t understand the message.”
The kids had to leave behind their outdoor gear and jackets when they came out of the school.
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Anno claimed that it was only a moment later, after receiving a call from a friend alerting her to the massacre at the school, that she realized what her son had meant.
Tanja Hietamies, a 50-year-old social worker, was one of the mothers who had to wait in line to pick up her daughter, an 11-year-old student at the school.
Hietamies claimed that her daughter couldn’t message her for an hour.
As she waited for her daughter to be released, she said that the child was afraid and uneasy.
One mother said that her son, a Russian speaker in the fifth grade, had experienced bullying at school and that he did not feel comfortable there.
“(My son) recently spoke about the fact that he is afraid of a school shooting,” she stated.
Regarding the motive of the sixth-grader suspect, police stated that it was premature to discuss.
Sanna Ytterstrom, the business manager, claimed she rushed to the scene to pick up her 11-year-old daughter after learning about the event through a call from the school.
These kinds of wild things just don’t happen in Finland, Ytterstrom said.
