A 13-year-old boy walked into the Instituto São José public school in Rio Branco, Brazil, on Tuesday, May 5, 2026, and opened fire in a hallway leading to the principal’s office, killing two female staff members and wounding two others, including an 11-year-old girl shot in the leg.

The attack, which unfolded inside a school in the northwestern state of Acre, sent panicked children scrambling onto the roof and clawing at a six-meter wall in a desperate bid to escape. By the time officers arrived, the teenage gunman had surrendered. The weapon, authorities said, had belonged to his stepfather.

The two women killed died at the scene. A second staff member and the wounded student were rushed to a hospital. Officials declined to release the victims’ names as families gathered outside the school, weeping and clinging to one another while emergency crews carried a woman out on a stretcher.

Chaos in a School Hallway

Lieutenant Colonel Felipe Russo of the Acre military police department told reporters the suspect fired several shots in a corridor leading to the principal’s office before giving himself up. Investigators have not yet established whether the boy was a current or former student at the school, and Acre police have opened a formal inquiry.

The gun used in the shooting was registered to the boy’s legal guardian, who police said was his stepfather. He was also detained on Tuesday as authorities worked to determine how the teenager gained access to the firearm.

Next door, at a hotel that shares a wall with the campus, 19-year-old receptionist Eduardo Rodrigues Cavalcante watched the chaos spill over. Students climbed onto the school roof. A few tried to vault the concrete barrier separating the two buildings.

“The wall is six meters high, and only one person managed to jump over and take refuge here in the hotel. The other people were left on the school roof trying to escape,” Cavalcante told reporters, adding that he heard “gunshots and a lot of screaming.”

A State in Mourning

Acre Governor Mailza Assis ordered classes suspended for three days at every school in the state and dispatched psychological support teams to assist traumatized students, teachers and families. Counselors began arriving at schools across the state capital on Wednesday morning.

“The state expresses deep solidarity with the victims’ families, the school community of Instituto São José and all education professionals affected by this incident,” Assis said in a statement.

Images broadcast by local outlets captured the aftermath: a woman being wheeled away on a stretcher, parents collapsing into each other’s arms at the gates, students still clutching their classmates as they were guided away from the building. The school sits in a residential pocket of Rio Branco, hemmed in by businesses and the hotel where Cavalcante was working when the first shots rang out.

Part of a Grim Pattern

Tuesday’s bloodshed adds to a string of attacks on Brazilian schools that have produced dozens of deaths over the past several years and forced a national reckoning over campus security, gun access and the radicalization of young men online.

In September 2025, two teenagers were shot and killed and three others wounded at a school in the northeastern state of Ceara. Ceara had also recorded a school shooting in 2022, when a teenager opened fire on three classmates, killing one. In October 2023, a 17-year-old student was shot dead and three others were wounded at a school in Sao Paulo. That same year, a teenager was killed and three others were wounded in a knife attack as students left a school in Minas Gerais.

The deadliest recent assault came in April 2023, when a 25-year-old man entered a daycare center in Santa Catarina and killed four children between the ages of 3 and 7 with an axe. A year earlier, a former student armed with a semiautomatic pistol and a revolver killed four people and wounded 12 in coordinated attacks on two schools. Police later said that gunman wore a swastika pinned to his vest and had spent two years planning the attacks.

Investigation Now Underway

Investigators in Acre will now try to piece together how a 13-year-old came to carry a loaded firearm into a school, and whether anyone close to him recognized warning signs in the days or weeks before the shooting. The teenager remains in custody. His stepfather, who legally owned the gun, faces questions about how the weapon was stored.

For Rio Branco, a city of roughly 400,000 residents tucked deep in the western Amazon, the attack is the kind of event that residents had long associated with elsewhere. By Wednesday morning, the state government had again offered its condolences to the families of the women killed and pledged a full accounting of how the violence was allowed to unfold.