Two young men who stormed their former school in southern Brazil armed with a gun, crossbows and axes, killing seven people, were trying to emulate the 1999 Columbine attack in Colorado and had been planning the assault for months, police said Thursday.
Friends and former classmates told investigators that 17-year-old Guilherme Taucci Monteiro and 25-year-old Henrique de Castro were obsessed with the attack on Columbine High School, Sao Paulo civil police director Ruy Ferraz told a news conference. He said the pair had been planning the attack since at least November.
Ferraz said a third person, a 17-year-old former student at the school, had been involved in planning but was not present at the school when the attack happened. What happened next at the K-12 school, partially caught on surveillance camera footage at the building's entrance and widely distributed in Brazil, was stomach-churning.
"If only we could have identified the difficulties of these boys" before the attack, said Rossieli Soares, the state education secretary, who attended the wake at a volleyball arena. "This is a problem in our society." "The big question is: What was the motivation of these former students?" he told reporters Wednesday.
Ferraz, the police director, said that while bullying had been mentioned in some testimony from acquaintances, they did not believe it to be meaningful to the investigation.
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