Police charge 17-year old in Canada after 4 shot dead

“There has never been a school shooting of this magnitude in the country”, St. Germaine said.

Police say a 17-year-old has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder and seven counts of attempted murder in a mass shooting at a school and home in northern Saskatchewan.

Police said the male suspect can not be named under Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act.

As phone calls started coming in from panicked students and teachers about a shooter on the loose, RCMP sped down the street to the local high school and found its main doors blasted with holes.

The gunman was active for about eight minutes, before police chased him through the school, arrested him and took him into custody, police said.

Officers found nine staff and students had been shot – one woman, who was a teachers aide, died at the scene while a male teacher died in hospital.

Dead are, Marie Janvier, 23, a teachers assistant at the school, brothers Dayne and Drayden Fontaine and Wood.

“I didn’t know what was going on”, she said.

The acting Mayor Kevin Janvier’s daughter was also one of the victims at the school shooting site.

“Adam was quite an adventurer, had a passion for life, and would often make you laugh until your stomach hurt”.

“This is a significant event for Canada”, Saint-Germaine said.

Norma Janvier, a community co-ordinator at the school and colleague of Marie but not a close relative, said: “I’m still in a little bit of shock”. She had graduated from the school two years earlier and a friend said she was hired as a teacher’s aide last fall. “I’m just so sad”, he said. “They would just come running to her. And she was just a friend to everybody”. “He was always up for a good challenge and lived each day joyously”, his family, which lives in Uxbridge, Ont., said in a statement. “‘Run, bro, run!” Noel Desjarlais-Thomas, 16, recalled his friends saying to him as they fled La Loche’s junior and senior high school.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said he had been advised of the shooting by the RCMP.

“We were going back to gym class, that’s when I heard the first shot”, he explained. “And then I was hearing those shots, too, so of course I started running”.

Goodale is scheduled to travel to La Loche on Sunday, along with Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall and AFN Chief Perry Bellegarde, to meet with local residents and extend their condolences. The school’s Facebook page said it would remain on lockdown until the Royal Canadian Police resolve the matter.

“He offered that perhaps those communities where these types of events have occurred in the past in his country … they might be able to provide some counsel, some support, some ideas around approaches for the days ahead”.