Prosecutor: Texas teen mistakenly killed friend in school

BELLAIRE, Texas (AP) — A 16-year-old student mistakenly shot his friend in their Houston-area high school’s ROTC room before fleeing the building, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said that based on evidence gathered so far that the shooting was not intentional and that both student were part of the ROTC group.

The 16-year-old was minor has been charged with manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old student at a Texas high school, a spokesman for Ogg’s office said.

The minor and another person were arrested about 3 1/2 hours after the Tuesday afternoon shooting at a high school in Bellaire, a suburb southwest of Houston.

A spokesman for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office said Wednesday that the minor could not be identified because of privacy laws and did not immediately answer other questions. Authorities also haven’t released basic non-identifying information about the alleged shooter, including the person’s age or sex.

Police said they received a call about the shooting at around 4 p.m. and that the victim died later at a hospital. There have been conflicting media reports about whether the shooting happened inside or outside the school.

Grenita Lathan, the interim superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, confirmed that a student was killed. The district canceled classes Wednesday, after Latham originally said they were going on as scheduled.

Classes will resume Thursday with additional police officers patrolling campus, Lathan said in a statement. She said it may be “some time” before the cause of the shooting is clear.