At least 19 children, 2 teachers killed at Texas elementary school

— A gunman wearing body armor and carrying a rifle killed at least 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in this Texas city on Tuesday, authorities said.It was the deadliest mass shooting to unfold at an American school in nearly a decade.The massacre began at 11:32 a.m., police said, on the third-to-last day of the school year. In 2018, 17 students and staff were killed at a high school in Parkland, Fla.The rampage in Texas came as the nation was still reeling from a mass shooting earlier this month in Buffalo, where a gunman killed 10 people in a racist attack at a grocery store.In the first hours after the school shooting in Texas, law enforcement officials were still trying to determine what the gunman's motive might have been, according to people familiar with the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the early stages of the investigation.The person identified as the gunman just turned 18, and did not have a criminal record, although it is possible that if there were juvenile arrests, those would have been expunged and not immediately located, the people said.The gunman bought his weapons immediately after his 18th birthday, which was May 16, according to a person briefed on the investigation’s early findings.Witnesses described a scene of terror at Robb Elementary School, home to students in the second, third and fourth grades. Sotelo said the gunman barricaded himself in the school for a terrible 45 minutes as anxious parents gathered outside, a crowd that grew to more than 300 people.Inside, Tamica Martinez’s 10-year-old son heard gunfire from the fourth-grade classroom next door. Her son saw two children shot, Martinez said, and escaped the school by crawling out a window.She rushed to the school when she heard about the shooting but did not find out he was safe until two hours later, when she received a text from her son’s teacher. “It could have been my son who got shot,” Martinez said.Sotelo said he saw several teachers and children who had been trapped inside during the ordeal later exit the school, including a little girl in a pink and white T-shirt covered in blood, sobbing and injured.“We saw a little girl full of blood and the parents were screaming, it was an ugly scene,” Sotelo said.