Michael Brandon Hill packing nearly 500 rounds at Georgia elementary school
LITHONIA, Ga. The suspect in Tuesday's Atlanta-area school shooting took a photo of himself with an AK 47-style rifle and packed up nearly 500 rounds of ammunition — enough to shoot more than half the school's students — the police said Wednesday.
Police said Michael Brandon Hill got the gun from an acquaintance, but it's not clear if he stole it or had permission to take it.
No one was injured Tuesday, but the suspect exchanged gunfire with police who surrounded Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur. The school's 870 students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade were evacuated...
Investigators said Hill may not have gone into the school with the idea of killing students, CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann reports from Decatur, Ga. They said that Hill had another motive, but what that was, police won't say.
Also Wednesday, CBS News obtained a police report showing Hill was arrested earlier this year for allegedly threatening on Facebook to shoot his older brother in the head "and not think twice about it."
The Henry County police report shows that Hill's older brother, Timothy Hill, told police last New Year's Eve that threats Michael made a day earlier made Timothy "fear for his life."
"Mr. Hill advised his brother stated on Facebook that he would shoot him in the head and not think twice about it," a police officer wrote in the report.
Timothy Hill told police that he knew his younger brother had "mental issues" and was under a doctor's care but that he didn't know where Michael was living at the time.
More than two months later, in March, Michael Hill turned himself in on the outstanding warrant for making "terroristic threats."
Hill's brother told CBS News the suspect is bipolar and schizophrenic and has tried to kill himself several times, Strassmann reports. In June 2009, he admitted to setting his parents' house on fire...
Hill held two staff members in the front office captive for a time, the police chief said, making one of them call a local TV station. At some point, he fired into the floor of the school office. As officers swarmed the campus outside, he shot at them at least a half a dozen times with an assault rifle from inside the school and they returned fire, police said. Police came into the school office, and Hill surrendered....
The ordeal terrified parents.
Rufus Morrow was at work when he got a phone call with news that shots had been fired at the school his daughter attends.
He drove "about 90 mph" to the school. The police chief says Hill, armed with an assault rifle and other weapons, was able to slip into the school where visitors must be buzzed in by staff.
Morrow said he almost cried as he told his supervisor why he needed to leave.
"Just the mere thought of what happened at that other elementary school happening here, it was just devastating to my soul," he said, referring to the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut in December that left 26 people dead, 20 of them children.
Dramatic television footage showed lines of young students racing out of the building with police and teachers escorting them to safety. They sat outside in a field for a time until school buses came to take them to their waiting parents and other relatives at a nearby Wal-Mart.
Morrow was one of those parents and held his 10-year-old daughter close to him during an interview after the two were reunited.
"My stomach was in my throat for the whole time until I saw her face on the bus," he said.
His daughter, a fifth-grader named Dyamond, told The Associated Press that a voice came over the intercom saying school was under lockdown and instructed students to get under tables. She said her teacher told the class to sing and pray.
"There were a lot of girls crying, I was feeling scared but I didn't cry. I was just nervous," she said...
Students at the school arrived Wednesday morning at nearby McNair High School, where they would attend classes for the time being. The high school's marquee said "Welcome McNair Elementary School Our Prayers Are With You."...
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57599610/michael-brandon-hill-packing-nearly-500-rounds-at-georgia-elementary-school/
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