TEXAS HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTING

CNN - Another school shooting, another community reeling from a (seemingly) never-ending wave of gun violence. And the all-too-familiar cycle that happens after a school shooting starts up again: the initial shock and horror; the mourning of the victims; the anger at the shooter; the verbal battle over gun control, the response (or non-response) from lawmakers. 

Ten people -- eight students and two teachers -- were killed Friday at Santa Fe High School in Texas after police say a fellow student opened fire. The shooting lasted a terrifying 30 minutes, with police officers and the gunman exchanging shots for 25 of those minutes. The victims included an exchange student from Pakistan, a substitute teacher and a teen killed a day before his own birthday party.

The suspected shooter, 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, was arrested and charged with capital murder and aggravated assault of a public servant. Officials haven't released a motive, but Pagourtzis has a social media footprint that features a custom T-shirt emblazoned with the words "BORN TO KILL," as well as images of Nazi, communist, fascist and religious symbols.

This is the 22nd school shooting with casualties since the beginning of the year - an average of one a week. Incoming NRA President Oliver North said the cause of such attacks is kids on Ritalin. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called out video games, the entertainment industry and throwing God out of school. He also blamed Friday's massacre in part on "too many entrances and too many exits" on the campus. And even after it was revealed that one of the weapons the shooter used was a shotgun, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott still touted a shotgun giveaway on his website.

TERRIFIED YET DETERMINED, STUDENTS FOUGHT TO STAY ALIVE

By Jack Healy, Manny Fernandez, and Alan Blinder

Just outside the ceramics storeroom where Trenton Beazley huddled on the floor, his classmates and substitute teacher from first-period art lay dead. A gunman stalked back and forth between two adjoining classrooms inside Santa Fe High School, firing blast after blast.

This was really happening. Again. This time, to them.

Mr. Beazley, 15, a catcher on the high school baseball team, had woken up on Friday morning excited about that evening’s quarterfinal game against Kingwood Park. When Mr. Beazley slipped into art class, the substitute, Ann Perkins, had been telling another student to go get a tardy pass. Everything about that muggy late-spring morning seemed so routine.

Then, at about 7:30 a.m., Mr. Beazley heard the sound that has become too routine in schools across America: Bang. Bang. Bang.

On Saturday, through their shock, grief and anger over a massacre that left 10 people dead and 13 wounded, this broken, stunned community of 13,000 struggled to find any reason behind it all. The authorities have not announced any motive but said that Dimitrios Pagourtzis, a 17-year-old student at Santa Fe High, had confessed to the rampage and told investigators he had spared students he liked so that “he could have his story told.”

Like millions of their peers, the students here grew up in the shadow of school shootings. They had done active-shooter drills since grade school. A school resource officer, who was critically wounded on Friday, patrolled their sprawling red brick school, which is an hour southeast of Houston.

In February, they had been spooked by a lockdown ordered after someone reported a pop-pop-pop sound outside. Devin Maier, 17, remembers not being able to go back to class that Monday and Tuesday. “I was just scared,” she said.

The school massacre that same month in Parkland, Fla., struck a response here, too, as a small group of students marched and waved signs that declared, “Never Again.”

But for many, the protests and preparations only hardened the shard of dread that occupied their thoughts — that one day, the television scenes of tears and police tape, memorial flowers and hands-up fleeing children, would arrive for them. Their turn.

“In the back of my mind, I knew it was going to happen,” said Madilyn Williams, 18.

Other students would later say they thought they heard a garbage can slamming or metal being hammered, but Mr. Beazley said he and his classmates knew almost immediately what was happening.

They bolted for the storeroom where the pottery kilns were kept while Ms. Perkins went to shut the classroom door. She was one of the two teachers killed.

The last thing Mr. Beazley saw as they tried to slam the door was the gunman, clad in a black trench coat, heading toward the closet, a strap of shotgun shells slung across his chest.

“I realized then, wow, he’s not playing around,” Mr. Beazley said.

The students tried desperately to barricade the closet door with a heavy pottery kiln. He smashed his fists against a heat vent to dislodge the kiln from the wall, but as he shoved it across the floor, the gunman jabbed his .38 pistol through a broken window of the closet door. Mr. Beazley heard a taunt that is now burned onto his memory: “Surprise,” the gunman said, followed by an expletive. Then:  Bang.

He killed a student who lay near the door, and as Mr. Beazley pushed and pushed on the kiln, he aimed at Mr. Beazley.  Bang.

“He saw me,” Mr. Beazley said. He was grazed in the side, and then struck again by the bullet’s ricochet. “I just dropped to the floor.”

While students puzzled over the gunman’s motives, the mother of Shana Fisher, a 16-year-old who was among those killed, said on Saturday that Mr. Pagourtzis had made advances toward her daughter for four months, which she consistently turned down.

“He had been getting more aggressive, more aggressive,” Ms. Fisher’s mother, Sadie Rodriguez, said. “Finally, she stood up to him, she stood up to him in class last week.”

Ms. Rodriguez said she did not discuss the events directly with her daughter. But she said that Ms. Fisher had told her sister and Ms. Rodriguez’s brother of her problems with Mr. Pagourtzis, and of the most recent confrontation in class.

Rome Shubert was in the first classroom to be attacked on Friday morning. He had been drawing 3-D shapes in art class when his teacher left to drop off something in another classroom. The gunman walked in through the open door “guns blazing,” Mr. Shubert said.

“I hear boom. Three seconds later — boom. A couple seconds later, another bang,” he said. “My ears are ringing and I have no idea what’s going on. His first shots were definitely in our room.”

Mr. Shubert, a 16-year-old pitcher on the baseball team, dived under a table and flipped it onto its side for cover. He said he saw Mr. Pagourtzis fire at one male student lying on the floor, but he seemed to miss the student on purpose.

“He shoots a couple feet to his left, and then he shoots near him,” Mr. Shubert said.

Mr. Shubert eventually ran out of the room and hopped a wall behind the school. There, a friend told him what he had not realized until then: He had been shot. He was bleeding from the back of his head.

“The doctors told me if it would have been any up, any down, any left or right, that I could be paralyzed for the rest of my life or killed,” he said on Friday night, a bandage poking from underneath his curly red hair.

In a nearby agriculture class, Layton Kelly and his friends sprang to action as if they had been training for that awful moment. They heaped desks in front of the door, stacking them as high as they could. They shut off the lights and huddled in the blackness, some praying, some crying, most of them trying fruitlessly to get a cell signal to reach their parents, as shot after shot echoed from just outside the door.

Mr. Kelly said he counted at least 15.

Dalton Stevens, 16, another pitcher on the varsity baseball team, stayed huddled in a small storage space inside the dance classroom, where he had been taking a stretching class for athletes. Nine male students and their teacher hunkered down in a tiny closet, surrounded by the Native American-themed, green-and-gold costumes for the school’s Tribal Belles dance team.

“The fire alarm starts to go off because someone pulled the fire alarm,” he said. “We keep on hearing shots. I’m shaking. I’m freaking out. I don’t know what to do. Everyone is frantic. I prayed a couple times.”

The dance teacher in the room with them, Ashley Hardage, told the students to stay calm, to stay quiet.

So he took out his cellphone and texted his mother. At 7:46 a.m., from inside the closet, Mr. Stevens wrote: “There’s someone shooting in the school.”

At 7:49 a.m., he wrote a second one: “I love you.”

At one point, a man who Mr. Stevens believed was the wounded school resource officer, John Barnes, entered the dance classroom after being shot in a confrontation with the gunman. Mr. Stevens desperately wanted to help the officer, but they did not open the closet door.

“I know I couldn’t just go out there because I know the shooter’s in the art hallway,” he said.

“It sounded like he was dying,” Mr. Stevens said. “I hear him in the room and I hear him talking on the radio, and I hear his restricted breathing, in agonizing pain. We hear other police officers come in, thank God. They exchange gunfire in the hallway.”

The gunman engaged the police in a 15-minute firefight that ended when he surrendered, abandoning what he said had been a plan to kill himself, said Galveston County Judge Mark Henry, the top local elected official.

After several minutes of silence, Mr. Stevens heard SWAT officers knock on the door and tell them the assailant was in custody, but the students still stayed quiet in the closet and did not open the door. They believed that the gunman could have been tricking them into opening the door.

“We didn’t say a word,” he said. “They had knocked on the door and said it was the police, but with our protocol, we’re taught not to say anything until someone comes and unlocks the door and opens it.”

By 8:06 a.m., he was out of the closet and his parents were rushing to the school. His mother texted him back: “On my way. I love u.”

The students in the closet threaded their way out through hallways covered in blood.

“I’ve never been so scared in my life,” Mr. Stevens said.

Grief washed over Santa Fe as parents and friends began to learn the names of the eight students and two teachers whose lives were cut short.

Cynthia Tisdale, a teacher, would not get to live out her wish of retiring to spend more time with her grandchildren. Christopher Stone, 17, would never again delight his friends with his dance moves and charm. Sabika Sheikh, 17, a foreign exchange student, would never get to reunite with her parents in Pakistan. Shana Fisher, who just turned 16, would never come home to her beloved dog, Kallie. And on and on.

The gunman’s family also released a statement on Saturday, saying it was “as shocked and confused as anyone” and that the news media’s descriptions of him and his actions seemed “incompatible with the boy we love.” It said it was cooperating with the investigation.

Jack Healy and Manny Fernandez reported from Santa Fe, Tex., and Alan Blinder from Atlanta. Julie Bosman contributed reporting from Chicago.

29.2 MILLION AMERICANS TUNED-IN, THE ROYAL WEDDING

CNN - What else is there to say about this wedding? Megan Markle was stunning. Prince Harry's visible nervousness was adorable. The multicultural touches were historic. The celebs' outfits were on point. Princess Charlotte's wave was too cute. And a 19-year-old cellist nearly stole the show. But if you did miss the big day, or just want even more details on it, our AJ Willingham offers up every romantic and emotional moment. 

There is one detail we don't yet know, however. Just where will the Duke and Duchess of Sussex go on their honeymoon? 

Photo Ops - the day unfolded in pictures, including this amazing pic that shows the tiniest details.

LAST WEEK ON 1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

Investigate the investigators, Trump says

• President Trump has intensified his frequent threats to intervene in the special counsel inquiry, demanding that the Justice Department look into whether the department or the F.B.I. had “infiltrated or surveilled” his campaign.

The president has said that an F.B.I. informant who was sent to talk to his campaign aides was actually a spy dispatched for political purposes. In fact, the F.B.I. sent the informant only after receiving evidence that the advisers had suspicious contacts linked to Russia.

Legal experts said Mr. Trump’s call for an investigation had little precedent and could force a clash with the Justice Department reminiscent of the one involving Richard Nixon during Watergate.

Giuliani has more to say

• Also on Sunday, Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani said the special counsel, Robert Mueller, hoped to finish by Sept. 1 the investigation into whether the president obstructed the Russia inquiry. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.

Giving peace a chance

• “We’re putting the trade war on hold.”

That was Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Sunday, announcing that the Trump administration had suspended plans to impose sweeping tariffs on China as trade talks continue.

Analysts warned that the decision could thrust the U.S. back into the kind of long negotiations that have bogged down previous administrations.

Might North Korea Meeting Not Happen? 

President Trump is grappling with the risks of his planned summit meeting next month with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un after Pyongyang declared last week that it would not readily give up its nuclear arsenal. Mr. Trump is scheduled to meet President Moon Jae-in of South Korea in Washington on Tuesday ~ NYTimes, Chris Stanford, May 21, 2018, Morning Brief.