A gunman shot and critically wounded two kindergarten boys ages five and six at a tiny Christian school in northern California this week.
The shooter, Glenn Litton, had a reported history of mental illness and he appears to have targeted the school because of its affiliation with the Seventh Day Adventist Church.
Litton used a “ruse” of pretending to enroll a fictitious grandson in the Feather River School of Seventh-Day Adventists in Oroville just so he could gain entry. The tiny school has fewer than three dozen students.
After shooting the two young boys, Litton killed himself with the same gun just yards from the school. His two victims have survived but will face a difficult recovery.
"The fact that they are currently still with us is a miracle," Butte County Sheriff Kory L. Honea said of the children, adding they will likely face additional surgeries and "have a very long road ahead of them."
Authorities say Litton had written about taking "counter-measures" against the school in response to U.S. involvement in violence in the Middle East, according to Sheriff Honea. He said it's unclear why Litton made a misguided link between the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and what is going on in the Middle East.
"That’s a motivation that was in his mind. How it was that he conflated what’s going on in Palestine and Yemen with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, I can’t speculate. I’m not sure that we’ll ever know that," Honea said.
Litton, 56, had attended a school of Seventh-Day Adventists in another town as a child, the sheriff said.
The shooter did have a lengthy criminal history, mostly for theft and identity theft, but authorities said they did not find any violent crimes on his record. As a convicted felon, Litton could not legally possess a firearm, so he used a so-called ghost gun to commit this crime.
The Seventh-Day Adventist Church is a Christian denomination in which members consider the Bible their only creed and believe that the second coming of Christ is near.
Another Christian school was targeted by a gunman in a high-profile shooting last year. That shooter killed three 9-year-olds and three adults at The Covenant School in Nashville in March of 2023.
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