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Five injured in Cleveland school shooting
14-year-old suspect apparently killed himself after attack, police say

CLEVELAND - A gunman opened fire in a downtown high school on Wednesday, and five people were taken to a hospital, the mayor said.

The suspected shooter was killed by an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound after the rampage, police said.

Mayor Frank Jackson later said SuccessTech Academy had been secured, although police were searching floor by floor.

"We have no reason to believe there's more than one suspect," Jackson told reporters gathered outside the school.

The shooting victims include a 57-year-old male, a 42-year-old male, a 17-year-old male and a 14 year-old male, Jackson said. A fifth person, a 14-year-old girl, injured her knee, he said.

Two of the victims were teachers, and three victims were taken to MetroHealth Center, WKYC reported. One shooting victim was taken to Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital, WOIO-TV reported.

A spokesperson for the MetroHealth Center said the 57-year-old is a teacher and is in good condition. Jackson said the students were in stable condition.

The suspect, a 14-year-old freshman, was suspended earlier this week after getting into a fight with another student, several sources reported.

The school's security guard was on vacation, WKYC reported, and two other full time security guards had been laid off in recent years.

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Parents wait anxiously
Students stood outside the building, many in tears and on cell phones. Family members also stood outside, anxiously waiting for their children to be released.

One student at the school said she heard the principal say "Code Blue" over the public address system, and the students started running. Doneisha LeVert said she hid in a closet with some of her friends.

Ronnell Jackson, 15, said he saw a shooter running down the hall and ducked out the door.

"He was about to shoot me but I got out just in time," he said. "He was aiming at me ... I got out just in time."

Tammy Mundy, 38, who has a son and daughter at the school, told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland that her daughter called when the shooting started.

"She said, 'Mom they're shooting in here, kids are running out, I'm hiding in the closet,"' Mundy told the newspaper.

Then she called her 18-year-old son, Darnell Rodgers, on his cell phone, and he told her he had been shot in the arm.

"He said, 'Mom, I got shot,"' Mundy told the newspaper.

Police shut down several nearby roads because of the shooting, WKYC reported.

'Just panic'
Cleveland resident April Hardin, who works nextdoor to the high school where the shooting occurred, told MSNBC.com that she returned from her lunch break to find chaos.

“When I got from my car to the building, I saw a group of girls kind of backing away, and they were like, ‘I’m not going back in there, I’m not going back in there,’” said Hardin, who is seven-and-a-half months pregnant.

Fire trucks and police filled the area, Hardin said. “They said, ‘Just stay at your desk, there’s been a shooting.’ It was pretty scary.”

Hardin and her co-workers then watched the scene through the windows of their offices at Cleveland’s Ampco System Parking. Students were “sitting on the fence crying,” Hardin said. “It was just panic.”

Alternative school
SuccessTech Academy is an alternative high school in the Cleveland city school district. The school enrolls about 240 mainly black students with a small number of white and Hispanic students. All the students are poor under federal poverty guidelines.

The school has an academic rating of continuous improvement, in the middle of the state's ratings for how well students perform. Its graduation rate is 94 percent, well above the district's rate of 55 percent.

The school emphasizes entrepreneurship by teaming teachers with local business owners to teach students about the business world. It uses an approach developed by E City Cleveland, a nonprofit group aimed at teaching business skills to inner-city teens.

According to the group's Web site, "E CITY is inspiring these teens by showing them that their innate street smarts, mental toughness, and creativity can be turned toward viable business ideas."

MSNBC.com's Elizabeth Chuck and The Associated Press contributed to this report.