ANTIGO, Wis. — An 18-year-old man opened fire with a high-powered rifle outside a high school prom in northern Wisconsin. He wounded two students before a police officer who was in the parking lot fatally shot him, authorities said Sunday.
Investigators would not discuss a motive or whether the two students were specifically targeted. A school administrator said it appeared the gunman — identified as Jakob Wagner — intended to go into the dance and start shooting randomly.
The teenagers who were wounded were shot as they exited the building, said Eric Roller, the chief of police in Antigo, a community of about 8,000 people roughly 150 miles north of Milwaukee.
"Officers were in the parking lot patrolling the activities and heard the shots, and an officer immediately fired upon the shooter, stopping the threat," Roller said.
The gunman was taken into custody and died at a hospital.
The female victim was treated and released, and the male victim was undergoing surgery for injuries that weren't life-threatening, police said. The wounded boy, who was shot in the leg, attended the high school but his date, who was grazed in the shooting, was from out of state, interim district administrator Donald Childs said.
Wagner was a senior at Antigo High School in 2015, but he did not graduate with his classmates and was continuing to work on his diploma, Childs said.
Dylan Dewey, who graduated from Antigo last year, said Wagner had been dating a girl at the school who broke up with him last month. He described Wagner as an "all-around good guy."