Six Shot Dead at High-school Party By Off-duty Police Officer

A police officer in a small town in northern Wisconsin yesterday shot dead at least six young people, including a 14-year-old girl, at a house party before he was shot and killed by a police sniper.

News reports from Crandon, a close-knit town of 2,000 people, suggested the suspected shooter and his victims were part of the same circle of friends - high school students and recent graduates, who had gathered on Saturday night to celebrate a high school football victory.

Six people were reported killed at the party, in a white clapboard house in the center of town. A seventh was critically injured in hospital yesterday.

At least three of the dead were high school students, including a 17-year-old believed to have been a former girlfriend of the suspected shooter. Another of the victims, Lindsey Stahl, was 14. Her mother, Jenny Stahl, told reporters her daughter had called home to ask permission to sleep at a friend's house on Saturday night.

"I'm waiting for somebody to wake me up right now. This is a bad, bad dream," the weeping mother told local reporters. "All I heard it was a jealous boyfriend and he went berserk. He took them all out."

The horror of the episode was deepened by the familiarity of many in Crandon with both victims and the suspected shooter, as well as the youth of all of those involved.

The suspected killer, a sheriff's deputy who also worked part-time as a town policeman, was 20 years old. Police said he was off duty at the time of the shooting.

"He was an A student. He was a good kid," Frank Bocek, a local resident told CNN. "You would never have thought this would come from a young kid like that."

Cody Hanson, 17, a classmate of two of the victims, was also shocked. "I've seen him, I've talked to him. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would do that," he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The rampage appears to have started on what should have been a festive weekend - the annual autumn homecoming ritual when recent graduates return to their high school.

A group of friends had gathered in an apartment within a large white framed house when the suspected shooter arrived shortly before 3am, according to news reports.

Local residents who lived a few doors away from the house, shown on television behind police barricades yesterday, described hearing the sounds of gunshots at about 3am local time. "I heard probably five or six shots, a short pause and then five or six more," Marci Franz, a local resident, told the Associated Press. "I wasn't sure if it was gunfire initially. I thought some kids were messing around and hitting a nearby metal building."

Then she heard eight louder shots and tires squealing, she said.

It was unclear how or when the episode ended, but the town mayor, Gary Bradley, told reporters the shooter had been shot dead by a police sniper.