He arrived with a warning for his friends. In a series of notes several weeks ago, he told them he planned to do “something stupid.” 
 
 Just after 10 a.m. Wednesday, his promise was kept and a community was left with a dead son, daughters in the care of trauma surgeons and scores of others grappling with the tough questions that inevitably follow school shootings. 
 
 Before the violence was over, one student, Sam Strahan, was dead. Three others – Emma Nees, Jordyn Goldsmith and Gracie Jensen – also were shot. By early afternoon all were with their families and listed in satisfactory condition at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center. 
 
 The accused boy with the deadly promise was Caleb Sharpe, a sophomore with a shoddily shaved head who brought a semi-automatic rifle and handgun to Freeman High School south of Spokane. The carnage was cut short by a jammed gun and a school custodian who tackled and disarmed him. By the time law enforcement officers arrived at the school, Sharpe was immobile. And by the time most of Spokane had heard about the events at Freeman, he was in the back seat of a patrol car. 
 
 The violence was swift, and brought to a rapid conclusion. 
 
 “These are senseless and tragic events that really don’t need to happen,” Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon. “And I don’t understand them. We need to figure out what’s going on in society that children think they need to take weapons to deal with the issues they’re facing.” 
 
 It began and ended in the hallway outside of the biology room on the school’s second floor just before first period. It was a “late start” day and students were heading to class, putting backpacks in lockers and readying for class. 
 
 Liam Marshall, 15, had just arrived to English class. On the bus with Sharpe, he’d noticed the duffel bag Sharpe carried. When Marshall heard the first shot, he didn’t immediately think back to that morning’s bus ride. 
 
 “Me and my friends were just laughing, thinking that someone was being crazy,” Marshall said. “We had no clue what was going on.” 
 
 But the shots kept coming, first stoking confusion, then driving chaos. Even without seeing the boy with a firearm, the students heard the growing chorus of gunshots and screams, and the noises that at first baffled the teenagers came into nightmarish focus: One of their own had a gun and was shooting their classmates. Students scrambled, classrooms were locked down. 
 
 Sharpe first lifted an AR-15 rifle from his duffel, but it jammed. He quickly moved to his next weapon, a handgun, and found Strahan. Accounts differ, but Sharpe may have shot into the ceiling, and Strahan may have tried to intervene. In the end, Sharpe shot Strahan in the head. 
 
 Sharpe didn’t kill anyone else, but not for lack of intent. As he moved down the hallway, gun in hand, he continued to fire. 
 
 Elliette Clark, 16, was in her math classroom when she heard gunshots in the hall. She peeked out and saw Sharpe firing the gun in a side grip position, as if he were a gangster, she said, and this was a movie, each of the four or five shots punctuated by the flash of the muzzle. She slammed the door. 
 
 “You could hear them screaming and crying in the hallway,” she said. Once the door closed, she said the screams grew louder because the girls were left in the hall. 
 
 Elisa Vigil, 14, was near Sharpe as he brandished his guns. 
 
 “His face was completely passive,” Vigil said. “He shot someone in the head. I crouched down in the hall. I looked up and a girl screamed, ‘Help me, help me, help me.’ The hall was empty. She was shot in the back. I looked to my right, and there was a boy and he was shot in the head.” 
 
 Ian Moser, 14, was at his locker when he heard three shots. 
 
 “Everyone was yelling, ‘Gun, gun, gun,’” Moser said. A girl, just 15 feet away from him, was shot, he said. Moser ran, fleeing to the bus barn across Jackson Road, and hid with others. The students fled so quickly, the path remained strewnwith their notebooks hours later. 
 
 Barratt Moland, 15, had just stepped into math class when the shots began. He dropped to the floor and ducked beneath a desk. Students rushed into the classroom, including Emma Nees. 
 
 Nees was bleeding. She told everyone in the room that she had only been grazed, but a teacher, Marty Jessett, saw two wounds on the freshman’s lower abdomen, where the bullet had entered and left her body. He grabbed some athletic tape and marked both with an X. 
 
 “He said, ‘Barratt, put on these gloves,’” Moland said. “I applied pressure to her wound. She actually handled it surprisingly well. I was at a loss for words. I didn’t even know if I was applying pressure correctly.” 
 
 Moland said he’s known Strahan and Sharpe for several years, and he believed the two were friends. 
 
 “I thought they hung out like every weekend,” Moland said. 
 
 But other students suggested the Sharpe and Strahan had a falling-out recently. 
 
 Knezovich made just one comment on Sharpe’s possible motives: “It sounds like a case of a bullying type of situation.” 
 
 In the hallway, the scene remained chaotic. 
 
 Then abruptly, Sharpe’s path was cut short. The school custodian, Joe Bowen, tackled Sharpe and stripped him of his weapon. 
 
 With the shooter immobilized, a teacher, John Hays, rushed out and applied pressure to Strahan’s head wound. 
 
 Emergency responders were dispatched at 10:11 a.m., and sheriff’s deputies, along with medical personnel and other local, state and federal law enforcement officers, rushed to the school. 
 
 At 10:57 a.m., the first ambulance arrived at Sacred Heart, which had begun preparing for the worst less than an hour before. Eight surgery suites and several trauma rooms were reserved and the hospital’s trauma unit was set into motion. 
 
 By 11:10 a.m., two of the injured girls had arrived at the hospital, and the third was on her way. The hospital was “all hands on deck,” said Dr. Jeff Collins, the hospital’s chief physician. 
 
 Friends and family of the girls began arriving at the emergency room, stricken and allowed to park where, normally, no cars go. Hospital security and local police began directing traffic. 
 
 Just before noon, the girls were listed in stable, satisfactory condition. 
 
 At the school, students called their parents or sent out dispatches on social media as soon as the shooting started. Distraught parents raced to the cluster of buildings that are Freeman’s elementary, middle and high schools when reports of the shooting first surfaced. 
 
 Among them were Rondielle and Chris Frye. 
 
 “My daughter actually called me because she was out at her car and she heard gunshots,” said Rondielle Frye. She told her daughter: “Run!” 
 
 Chris Frye drove to the scene as quickly as he could. 
 
 “I was about ready to have a panic attack,” he said. “I was following the cops damn fast.” 
 
 At the school, parents clustered, waiting for a word. A child was dead, but no one knew whose child it was. Knezovich came over and told them what he could, that at some point they’d let kids go 10 at a time and the ones who witnessed the shooting would go last. 
 
 Within 30 minutes of the shooting, students began evacuating from the building. School officials and sheriff’s deputies called their names, counted their heads and led them, single file, to the football field. They sat there for some time, some in the bleachers, some waiting to rejoin their parents across the street. 
 
 And some, on the way out, were led past Strahan’s body, which was covered with a blanket, lying in the hallway. 
 
 This story based on reporting by Eli Francovich, Jonathan Glover, Thomas Clouse, Rachel Alexander, Chad Sokol and Nina Culver. ||||| Sam Strahan died mere weeks after losing his father in a tragic accident on Father’s Day. 
 
 A sophomore at Freeman High School, Strahan was fatally shot after he confronted a fellow sophomore who’d come to school armed Wednesday morning. 
 
 Sam Strahan was a “true hero�? and an “incredible soul,�? who was close to his father, said Jennifer Guenther, a long-time friend of Strahan’s sister. 
 
 “Seeing him grow up to be such a positive and happy spirit to others around him was inspiring,�? Guenther said. “Sam was a brother who loved and cared for his older sister and always watched out for his mother.�? 
 
 A friend and classmate described Strahan as a fun-loving person who’d been deeply affected by the death of his father. 
 
 “He was really funny, and he likes to make lots of jokes,�? Liam Marshall said. “He just lost his father this past summer. I thought he was a lot wiser (after his father died). He didn’t do stuff like he used to do. But, he was still funny.�? 
 
 Another classmate, Bailey Coumont, a 15-year-old sophomore, remembered Strahan during a Wednesday night vigil at River Park Square. 
 
 “He was funny,�? she said. “He was very blunt. He could get on my nerves sometimes, but it was kind of just Sam. He was just kind of the class clown.�? 
 
 Sam’s father, Scott Strahan, died unexpectedly on June 18 when he was crushed beneath a motor home he was working on. Scott Strahan was 49, and he and his wife, Ami, had two children: Sam and Emily. Emily is a sophomore at the University of Washington, according to a fundraising account set up for the children after their father’s death. 
 
 In his father’s obituary, Sam was described as “a wonderful young man with his father’s unending patience and commitment.�? 
 
 His parents met and married in California, where they started a family before moving to Spokane in 2004, when Sam was a young child, according to Scott Strahan’s obituary. ||||| A sophomore boy brought a rifle and a handgun to Freeman High School just as classes were starting Wednesday morning, killing one student and seriously injuring three others, according to witnesses and investigators. 
 
 Numerous students, including several who witnessed the shooting, identified the shooter as Caleb Sharpe. They said he rode a bus to school Wednesday with the guns stashed in a duffel bag. 
 
 Witnesses described a bloody, chaotic scene in a second-floor hallway just outside a biology classroom. 
 
 “I was putting my backpack away and I heard a loud pop, and I turned around. He was walking around,” said Elisa Vigil, a 14-year-old freshman. “He had his pistol. His face was completely passive. He shot someone in the head. I crouched down in the hall. I looked up and a girl screamed, ‘Help me, help me, help me.’ The hall was empty. She was shot in the back. I looked to my right, and there was a boy and he was shot in the head.” 
 
 The shooting killed one teenage boy, Sam Strahan, and sent three teenage girls to the emergency room at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center. They are Emma Nees, Jordyn Goldsmith and Gracie Jensen. 
 
 Hospital officials said all three patients were in stable condition and one was expected to undergo surgery on Wednesday. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, there had been conflicting reports about the number of people injured. 
 
 Freeman High School serves more than 300 students southeast of Spokane. The shooting began shortly after 10 a.m. and lasted only about a minute, prompting lockdowns at dozens of schools in neighboring districts, as well as a massive response by local, state and federal agencies. 
 
 Authorities did not name the shooter, but Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich said at an afternoon news conference that the sole suspect was being held in the county’s juvenile detention center. Numerous students identified the shooter as Sharpe. 
 
 After law enforcement officials interviewed more than 100 people, a motive for the shooting started to come into focus. 
 
 “It sounds like a case of a bullying type of situation,” Knezovich said, without elaborating. 
 
 The shooter’s first gun jammed before he pulled out the second one, and another student approached him to try to intervene. That student is believed to be Strahan; authorities did not identify the victims by name. 
 
 “That student was shot, and that student did not survive,” Knezovich said. 
 
 Witnesses said a school custodian approached and tackled Sharpe. Knezovich said “the individual was already disabled” by the time a school resource deputy, who had been at the neighboring middle school, arrived at the scene. Deputies made the arrest without firing a shot, he said. 
 
 “We send our prayers out to the mother whose student is not coming home today,” he said. 
 
 Teacher led first aid 
 
 Barratt Moland, 15, of Valleyford said he was at his lockers before the first period. He had just stepped into his math class when he heard what he thought was a balloon popping. 
 
 “Then more shots followed so I hit the deck,” Moland said. “I dove underneath the desk.” 
 
 Students rushed into the room as teacher Marty Jessett tried to close the door and blinds. 
 
 “When people came in, I noticed one of them had blood on them,” Moland said. “That was Emma Nees. She was hit in the lower abdomen. She didn’t even notice it for a second. She said it only grazed her.” 
 
 But Moland said the teacher noticed that Nees, a freshman, had both entrance and exit wounds. He grabbed some athletic tape and marked both with an X. 
 
 “He said, ‘Barratt, put on these gloves,’” Moland said. “I applied pressure to her wound. She actually handled it surprisingly well. I was at a loss for words. I didn’t even know if I was applying pressure correctly.” 
 
 When emergency crews arrived for Nees, the students were led out the hallway and then into the biology room. Outside the room lay a body. Moland believed it was Strahan. 
 
 “I see things happen on national news. Then it just happened a couple hours ago,” Moland said. “That’s insane.” 
 
 Moland said he’s known Strahan and Sharpe for several years, and he believed the two were friends. 
 
 “I was not that close with (Strahan),” Moland said. “But I thought they hung out like every weekend.” 
 
 Suspect planned to do ‘something stupid’ 
 
 Liam Marshall, 15, said he rode the bus Wednesday with Caleb Sharpe, who was listening to music on headphones. Sharpe carried a duffel bag that apparently contained an AR-15 rifle and a handgun. 
 
 Marshall had just arrived at his first-period English class when he heard a bang in the hallway, about two rooms away. 
 
 “I heard one gunshot,” Marshall said. “Me and my friends were just laughing, thinking that someone was being crazy. That’s when I heard two others. We had no clue what was going on.” 
 
 Chaos ensued as Marshall and other students were locked down in place. 
 
 “Someone poked out the window and screamed to get out and lock the doors,” he said. “We saw three people sprinting.” 
 
 Some 30 minutes later, school officials and sheriff’s deputies evacuated Marshall and his fellow students. 
 
 “They called all our names and asked if anybody was unsafe. They did a head count and we were led out single file to the football field,” Marshall said. “When we came out of the classroom, someone told us the shooter was Caleb and everybody was saying (the victim) was Sam.” 
 
 Marshall said teacher John Hays rushed into the hallway and applied pressure to Strahan’s head wound but was unable to save him. 
 
 Marshall and Strahan were friends in both math and science classes this past year. 
 
 “He was really funny, and he likes to make lots of jokes,” Marshall said. “He just lost his father this past summer. I thought he was a lot wiser (after his father died). He didn’t do stuff like he used to do. But, he was still funny.” 
 
 Marshall said he remembers talking to Sharpe only once, even though they shared a second-period class, which they didn’t make it to on Wednesday. 
 
 “He’s really quiet,” Marshall said. 
 
 Michael Harper, 15, said he was a close friend of Sharpe’s. 
 
 “He was weird,” Harper said. “And he loved the show ‘Breaking Bad.’ He never really seemed like that person who had issues. He was always nice and funny and weird.” 
 
 But there were warning signs. Harper said Sharpe recently had become obsessed with school shooting documentaries, and his YouTube account shows Sharpe and his friends acting out violent scenarios with replica BB guns. 
 
 And weeks earlier, around the time classes started, Sharpe had written notes to some of his friends indicating he planned to do “something stupid,” Harper said. 
 
 They weren’t sure if the notes should be taken seriously, but one friend passed one of the notes to a counselor, Harper said. 
 
 ‘Mom, there are gunshots’ 
 
 As the first reports of the shooting began to surface, distraught parents raced to the cluster of buildings that are Freeman’s elementary, middle and high schools. 
 
 Among those parents were Rondielle and Chris Frye, who immediately left their jobs to get to the school. 
 
 “My daughter actually called me because she was out at her car and she heard gunshots,” said Rondielle Frye. 
 
 She told her daughter: “Run!” 
 
 Chris Frye drove as quickly as he could to get to the scene. 
 
 “I was about ready to have a panic attack,” he said. “I was following the cops damn fast.” 
 
 Cheryl Moser said her son, a freshman, called her from a classroom on the second floor after hearing shots fired. 
 
 “He called me and said, ‘Mom, there are gunshots.’ He sounded so scared. I’ve never heard him like that,” Moser said. “You never think about something happening like this at a small school.” 
 
 Nate Johnson said his son, also a freshman, called him clearly in tears. Johnson soon talked to his daughter, a senior, who told him that the shooting occurred at least partly in the hallway. 
 
 Just after the shooting, Amie Baxter described what she saw and heard while being held in a multipurpose room in the elementary school with about 30 other people. Police and other first responders walked around outside, some carrying gurneys and shouting information at one another, she said. 
 
 Baxter, whose two daughters attend the middle school, said in a phone call that children were running into buildings and an alarm was sounding when she drove into the school area at about 10:15 a.m. Classes were supposed to start soon because it was a “late start” day, Baxter said. 
 
 “They did a modified lockdown drill yesterday,” she said. “I thought it was weird because they wouldn’t do (a drill) two days in a row.” 
 
 The shooting also took a personal toll on some first responders, including Trooper Jeff Sevigney, the Washington State Patrol’s public information officer for Eastern Washington. 
 
 Sevigney tweeted Wednesday evening: “Worst day in my LE career. To respond to your own kids school for active shooter. Prayers for everyone involved.” 
 
 ‘It’s going to be someone we know’ 
 
 Rockford Mayor Carrie Roecks said the community is devastated by the shooting. She said she had never imagined something like it happening at a small school like Freeman, where practically everyone knows one another. 
 
 “What has happened here is going to affect every child in the district in one form or another,” said Roecks, whose grandchildren attend Freeman Elementary School. “I hope everyone stays as positive as we can be and the community just surrounds itself with a lot of love because we’re going to need it.” 
 
 All classes in the Freeman School District are canceled Thursday. 
 
 Before the victims’ identities were known, Roecks said, “Not knowing who is affected is hard. It doesn’t matter who it is because it’s going to be someone we know.” 
 
 This story reported and written by S-R reporters Chad Sokol, Jonathan Glover, Eli Francovich, Thomas Clouse, Nina Culver and Nick Deshais. ||||| In the video, Caleb Sharpe advances toward the camera, firing rounds from an Airsoft pistol. 
 
 The four-minute clip, called “The Second Round,” shows Sharpe and a friend on a quest to take out a fictitious drug dealer in their neighborhood. The pair brandish several guns over the course of their mission, at least one of which appears to be a real rifle. 
 
 Numerous classmates and witnesses identified Sharpe as the Freeman High School shooter who killed one student and wounded three more Wednesday morning. 
 
 Sharpe, a sophomore, rode the bus to school with two guns stashed in his duffel bag, witnesses said. He allegedly shot sophomore Sam Strahan in the head and wounded three girls before the school custodian stopped him. 
 
 Sharpe had written notes to some of his friends weeks earlier indicating he planned to do “something stupid,” said Michael Harper, who described himself as a close friend. One of the friends passed the notes to a counselor. 
 
 Friends and classmates described Sharpe as quiet and sometimes quirky, but said they were surprised to see him turn violent. His YouTube antics, however, were well-known to some of his classmates. 
 
 “We knew he had an assault rifle, because he uses it in his YouTube videos,” said Paul Fricke, a junior. 
 
 Many of the videos on Sharpe’s channel, where he goes by Mongo Walker, are unremarkable. In one, he pretends to be Bear Grylls, the British outdoor adventurer and reality TV star, as he explores his yard and comments on exotic creatures like a white dog in the background. Others involve Pokemon GO and a challenge to eat a raw hot pepper. 
 
 But a number of Sharpe’s videos, especially more recent ones, show him playing with guns. In a video from last Halloween, Sharpe and a friend set out to destroy a pumpkin that’s grown in the fence. 
 
 At one point, he aims the airsoft gun at his friend holding the camera and shoots as the friend exclaims, “Ow!” The clip replays in slow motion before the pair go on destroying the pumpkin with an ax and stick. 
 
 As rumors of Sharpe’s role as the shooter spread across social media Wednesday, commenters took to his channel, calling the videos disturbing. 
 
 “This video is so eerie it makes me sick,” one wrote about “The Second Round.” 
 
 Investigators still were interviewing witnesses Wednesday, and Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich said little about Sharpe’s motives. 
 
 Spokane County Sheriff’s Office deputies arrested Sharpe following the shooting. He’s being held in the county’s juvenile detention center. 
 
 Eli Francovich contributed to this report.
– Ami Strahan lost her husband on Father's Day when a motor home he was working on fell atop him. Less than three months later, she'd also lose her son. Sam Strahan was shot in the head shortly after 10am Wednesday by a schoolmate at Freeman High School in Spokane County, Wash., possibly as the sophomore tried to stop the shooter, reports the Spokesman-Review. Caleb Sharpe, whom a friend says had recently become interested in school shooting documentaries, had been seen carrying a duffel bag on the bus to school, per the Review. Once inside the building, he allegedly pulled an AR-15 rifle from within, the Review reports. When it jammed, he withdrew a handgun, witnesses say. According to one account, Sharpe shot into the ceiling, then killed Strahan as he tried to intervene. "His face was completely passive," a student says of Sharpe, who reportedly fired shots down a hallway. Three females were hit—including one in the back and one in the abdomen—before a custodian tackled Sharpe, witnesses say. Those injured are in stable condition, while Sharpe is now in a juvenile detention center. The teen—who showed off guns on his YouTube channel, archived here—had warned friends in a series of notes, passed to a counselor, that he planned to do "something stupid," per the Review. Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich describes the motive for the shooting as "a bullying type of situation." As for Strahan, "he gave everything to protect those who are in harm's way" and "that's how he'll be remembered," Knezovich tells the Washington Post.