Staying Up to Date on Connecticut School Shooting

Twenty-eight people were killed, including 20 children, at a Connecticut elementary school after a 20-year-old man went on a shooting rampage Friday.

The slayings happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., a Patch town of about 28,000 people located an hour outside of Stamford. Newtown Police descended on the school around 9:30 a.m. after a 911 call.

At a Friday press conference, authorites said 20 children and seven adults were killed, in addition to the gunman. Other reports have said the school's principal and a school psychologist were among the dead.

The alleged shooter was armed with four guns and a high-powered assault rifle. Authorities are currently searching his father’s home in New Jersey as part of the investigation. The suspect's mother lives in Newtown and was a kindergarten teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which has close to 600 students in kindergarten through fourth grade. She was among those killed, according to several news reports.

Police also have a second suspect in custody. According to eyewitness accounts, police found a man in the woods near the school wearing camouflage pants and took him in for questioning. As the man passed parents gathered near the school, he said, “I didn’t do it,” according to CBS News.

A parent interviewed on CBS News told the network his 8-year-old daughter said she heard an argument and cursing over the school’s loudspeaker, apparently coming from the principal’s office. Her teacher then immediately locked the classroom door as a safety precaution.

A fourth-grader at Sandy Hook Elementary School told Connecticut’s Channel 7 that he and his classmates were “locked in a closet in the gym” to escape the gunman.

One mother of an 8-year-old girl at the school, Brenda Lebinski, told Patch her daughter is safe thanks to one teacher's decision to move all kids into a closet when a gunman had entered the building.

Authorities said the scene is now secure and there is no longer a threat to public safety. They will be providing more details and holding another press conference on the incident as soon as they notify the families of the victims.

Newtown is a Patch town, so we have editors and reporters on the ground providing constant updates. To follow the developments, visit the main story here. 

Also, here's a link to a stream of photos and tweets from the scene at Sandy Hook Elementary.

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Correction: An earlier version of this story listed the wrong age for the apparent gunman. He was 20, not 24.