Shooting at Feather River Adventist School near Palermo, California, leaves suspected gunman dead and two students injured

A suspected gunman is dead and two students were injured in a shooting at Feather River Adventist School, a small elementary school near Palermo in Butte County, the sheriff’s office said.

The school serves 35 students in grades K-8. Its website states that it is operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church and that its mission is to provide “spiritually oriented education for children.”

Pastor Steven Brownell, a pastor within the Seventh-day Adventist Church, said he knows the school, its educators and its students well. He visits the school once or twice a week.

Brownell said a friend who is a chaplain at the hospital in Oroville called him to ask whether he had heard about the shooting at the school, which he said is called FRAS. “I told him I hadn’t heard and then all of a sudden the phone calls start coming like popcorn,” he said. “I just jumped in the car immediately and headed out to see if I could be of help.”

Brownell described his first reaction as sorrow that children anywhere must face something like this, and that teachers and parents must face it too, a moment for comfort in grief (Psalm 34:18). “To have to go through something like this is just unconscionable,” he said. “I can’t even imagine it.”

Source: Read the original report