Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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2 shot, 7 injured in school shooting by Bernie Wilson Associated Press EL CAJON, Calif. — Two people were shot and seven others were injured Thursday as gunfire erupted at a high school less than three weeks after two students were killed at a nearby school. An 18-year-old suspect was one of the two with gunshot wounds, police Capt. Bill McClure said. The other victim was believed to be a 16-year-old, but no details were released. The other victims were students and adults injured by broken glass and by falling, McClure said. The midday shooting at Granite Hills High School sparked a confusing scene, with officers scrambling across the campus as many of the 2,900 students fled to a nearby park. What happened wasn’t immediately clean McClure said a school police officer confronted the gunman near the administration building. School district spokesman Jim Esterbrooks said an El Cajon police officer was making a presentation to students when the shooting occurred. “That probably saved the school from a far worse fate,” Esterbrooks said. The gunman was wounded in an exchange of gunfire with a policeman, he said, but he didn’t know if it was the officer making the presentation. An 18-year-old believed to be the shooter was taken to suigery for a bullet wound to the face, said Eileen Cornish, a spokeswoman for Sharp Memorial Hospital. The hospital also received a 16-year-old student with a superficial wound to the chest, she said. “My information right now is that no one was seriously injured,” said Granger Ward, superintendent of Grossmont Union High School District. Junior Chris Wesley told KGTV he recognized the suspect as a fonner student who graduated from Granite Hills this past year. The gunman fired at least eight shots and reloaded his weapon during the shooting, Wesley said. “It just seemed like he was planning on doing it,” Wesley said. Ryan Carrillo, a sophomore at the school, told KGTV he heard gunshots as he walked to a bathroom near the school office. “It sounded like an explosion, like in a chemistry class or something,” he said of the first two shots he heard. After hearing five more shots, he ran out of the school. San Diego County sheriff’s spokesman Dan Papp said deputies were also at the school taking a report when the shooting happened, but he didn’t know why. Granite Hills High is just a few miles south of Santana High School in Santee, where a 15:year-old student allegedly killed two classmates and injured 13 others on March 5. Both schools are in the same district 17 miles east of San Diego. NATO spy planes sent to Macedonia by Robert Burns Associated Press WASHINGTON—The Pentagon on Thursday approved a request by NATO’s top commander to send several unmanned spy planes to monitor the Kosovo-Macedonia border, where etlinic Albanian rebels have fought a four-week insurgency. Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed an order dispatching Air Force “Predator” unmanned drones to the Balkans. The planes will arrive “in the next week or so,” Quigley told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston, the supreme allied commander in Europe, told a Senate panel Wfednesday that more unmanned aircraft are needed to provide Macedonian authorities with a clearer picture of rebel activity in the unmarked border area. Quigley said the order will dispatch two or three of the drones, accompanied by 80 troops to operate and maintain them. Predators are capable of feeding real time photographic images not only to U.S. commanders in the area but also to the Pentagon. Rumsfeld on Wednesday made clear that the Bush administration is sticking to a strategy of trying to help the Macedonian government deal with edinic Albanian violence without expanding U.S. military involvement in the Balkans. He told a Pentagon news conference the administration has no plans to put troops in Macedonia or send more peacekeepers to Kosovo despite NATO calls for more international troop support. Rumsfeld said the administration is concerned about the violence in Macedonia, but he indicated no sense of alarm. One of the themes of President Bush’s campaign was that the Clinton administration had overcommitted U.S. military forces in the Balkans and that as president, he would try to pull back. Asked whether he believed the stability of Macedonia was a vital national interest of the United States, Rumsfeld said, “Those are decisions that are made by the president of the United States.” A few hours later, a spokesman for the Albanian rebels offered a cease-fire, but it wasn’t immediately clear how the gesture would affect the tensions. British Defense Minister Geoffrey Hoon, appearing with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, spoke pointedly of the potential for escalating violence. “We would not want to see Macedonia as another tinderbox,” he said. Hoon said his government shares the U.S. view that the best approach, for now, is to assist the Macedonian government in its efforts to quell the violence without introducing foreign troops. “Clearly, it is a matter for Macedonia in the first place to resolve,” Hoon said. He said Britain is sending more military advisers and would consider sending troops if Macedonia asked. Foot-and-mouth Outbreak Disease forces Ireland to destroy livestock by Shawn Pogotchnik Associated Press BALLYMASCANLON, Ireland — Agricultural officials in white coveralls prepared Thursday to kill and bum an estimated 40,000 animals as the Republic of Ireland confirmed its first cases of foot-and-mouth disease. For three weeks, Ireland’s 3.7 million citizens had restricted their travel and other activities — even going so far as to cancel St. Patrick’s Day parades — in hopes of preventing the livestock disease from reaching Irish herds. “After all these nervous weeks, we were just starting to believe we’d beat it,” said cattle farmer John Elmore, whose herds are about 10 miles from Thursday’s confirmed outbreak on a sheep farm in the Cooley Peninsula in County Louth, near the border with Northern Ireland. The news sent shock waves though . Ireland, and stocks slumped more than 5 percent on the Dublin exchange. The entire Cooley Peninsula area had been subject to special restrictions 'and monitoring since foot-and-mouth disease was confirmed March 1 in a sheep herd across the border in Northern Ireland—triggering fears it would spread to the Irish republic and its $6 billion a-year livestock industry. The'epidemic began in Britain a month ago. Authorities moved quickly to try to restrict the disease to the Cooley area of County Louth. They announced that 3,000 sheep and 1,000 cattle within a half-niile of the infected farm would be slain first, and that about 40,000 livestock on the whole peninsula would be destroyed within the next few days. London. .$364] Paris.$426 Amsterdam.$467 Tokyo.$855 ■ iftI li I hKW4cl i_!_;. .. . . i ■■ i. i ■ I,. M ■ '.ii. Southeastern Fertility Center has helped many couples achieve pregnancy since 1983. We are in need of Egg Donors to continue to help infertile women. -Young healthy women between 21-32 -Requires a month of your time -Compensation is $2000 Financial Health Make sure your finances are in good health. Join our tradition of member service and see the advantages of credit union membership -- call or come by for more information! Carolina Collegiate Federal Credit Union 710 Pulaski Street, Columbia, South Carolina 29201 (803) 251-8474 • 1-800-476-5861 • www.carolina.org j> A _ World Briefs ■ U.S. forces Russian diplomats to leave county . WASHINGTON (AP)-The United States is ousting 51 Russian diplomats in retaliation for the planting of a suspected spy at the FBI — a move expected to draw a tit-for-tat re sponse from Moscow, U.S. officials said. ' ’The action is the largest diplomat expulsion since the Cold War and fur ther clouds dealings between the rela tively new administrations of President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB official. A senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said six Rus sians were ordered expelled immedi ately because U.S. investigators be lieve they were “intelligence handlers” directly implicated in the case of the accused spy, former FBI agent Robert Hanssen. ■ Macedonian police move into mountains to clear out rebels TETOVO, Macedonia (AP) — Ethnic Albanian rebels retreated with out a fight Thursday as heavily armed police launched a push to clear the hills above Tetovo of insuigents, a Macedonian police official, said. Shortly a^fter the government of fensive began, the boom of artillery or mortars could be heard, shattering more than 24 hours of calm around Tetovo, Macedonia’s second largest city. Still, there were reports of vio lence elsewhere. Police reported one officer was wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade just outside Skopje — the sec ond attack on a policeman in or near the capital in 24 hours. The police moved into the hills just a few hours after Macedonia’s president ignored the insuigents’ offer of a cease-fire and vowed instead to “neutralize and eliminate” them. ■ Golden Bear state was overcharged by power companies SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - Electricity wholesalers overcharged California $5:5 trillion over the past 10 months, according to a report by man agers of the state’s power grid. The five companies, among other tilings, frequently offered electricity at prices double what it cost them to pro duce, concluded the California Inde pendent System Operator study, which was published Thursday in the Los An geles Times. The Times said the ISO planned to file the study with federal regulators Thursday and are demanding that the money be paid back. The companies denied the allega tions, adding they expect the Federal I Energy Regulatory Commission will determine their prices were justified. ■ Furman freshman dies after falling 22 feet from balcony GREENVILLE, S.C. (AP) - A Furman University freshman fell from a second-story dormitory balcony and died early Thursday, a school spokesman says. Robert Austin Meythaler, 19, of Owensboro, Ky., apparently hoisted himself onto a 3 1/2-foot tall railing to get a better shot in a spitting contest with two other freshmen, spokesman Vince Moore said. Meythaler lost his balance and fell 22 feet from the balcony at about 1:45 a.m., Moore said. He died at Greenville Memorial Hospital about 6 1/2 hours later, the spokesman said. The hallway in the 40-year-old men’s dormitory empties into the bal cony for students to use. “It’s not just for show; it is a place where students gather all the time,” Moore said. Counselors were available for stu dents ;uu| staff and the campus chapel was opcit throughout the day, Moore said. ;3/ “Npbody can ever remember a student dying on campus,” he said.