School shooting suspect slipped past security via unsecured door, police say

A 17-year-old who opened fire at a Dallas high school on Tuesday, wounding five students, was able to bypass metal detectors by entering through an unsecured door that another student had opened for him, authorities said.

The shooter, Tracy Denard Haynes Jr., was charged with aggravated assault as part of a mass shooting, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. He turned himself in to the authorities on Tuesday night.

The shooting at Wilmer-Hutchins High School, about 10 miles southeast of downtown Dallas, was the second episode of gun violence to occur there in almost exactly one year. Last April, a student was charged with shooting one of his classmates in the leg while they were in class.

Around 1 p.m. Tuesday, investigators said, Haynes began shooting indiscriminately at a group of male students in a hallway after getting inside the school. The gunfire sent people running for cover, but one student was not able to get away, a school police officer said in the affidavit, citing security camera footage. That was when Haynes “appeared to take a point-blank shot,” the officer said.

Investigators said that five students were struck by the gunfire, which led authorities to place the high school and a nearby elementary school on lockdown. Classes were canceled for the rest of the week at the high school. A motive for the shooting was not immediately clear.

Four of the students who were injured in the shooting were taken to hospitals, said Jason L. Evans, a spokesperson for Dallas Fire-Rescue. As of Wednesday, two of them had been released, and the other two were being kept for observation, he said. It was unclear whether the fifth student who investigators had said had been struck by gunfire had received medical treatment.

A sixth student, a 14-year-old girl, was also taken to the hospital for anxiety-related symptoms, Evans said.

It was not immediately clear whether Haynes had a lawyer.

His aunt, Cynthia Haynes, told the Dallas Morning News on Tuesday that she was “shocked” to hear her nephew was the suspected shooter.

“He was not raised like that,” she said. “He came from a good family.”

Inmate records showed that Haynes was being held in lieu of $600,000 bond. Aggravated assault as part of a mass shooting is a first-degree felony in Texas; it carries a penalty of 5 to 99 years or life in prison for first-time offenders.

Urban Specialists, a Dallas organization that seeks to prevent violence, helped arrange for Haynes to turn himself in on Tuesday. The group did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

The organization’s president and chief executive, Antong Lucky, told CBS Texas that Haynes “was a young kid who was unaware, in my mind, of the consequences.” He said that it had been Haynes’ idea to turn himself in.

“He had the opportunity to run away from this situation,” he said, “but he said while I was sitting there talking to him that ‘I wanted to face this.’ ”

It was also not clear whether the student who let Haynes into the school through the unsecured door might face charges.

On April 12, 2024, a 17-year-old student fired a .38-caliber revolver at a classmate in a classroom at the school, wounding him in the leg in what the authorities said at the time was a targeted shooting. A teacher was credited with getting the student who fired the weapon to leave the school building before the student was taken into custody near the school’s stadium. The victim’s injuries were not life-threatening.

That episode prompted a walkout – a year to the day before the shooting on Tuesday – by students in protest of what they said were lax security measures at the school, which has metal detectors.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.