Parkland school shooting: Students left stunned after gunman opens fire

Students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida have been left shaken and stunned after a gunman opened fire on their campus and killed 17 people.

Joel Leffler, who has a son and a daughter at the school located about 45 miles north of Miami, said that both of his children were safe but in shock.

“My son called me as it was unfolding, running. He had to jump a fence,” Mr Leffler told NBC News. “My son heard around eight gun shots as he was running out.”

When he saw his daughter, she was whispering, he said.

“My daughter, who was there in the freshman hall where the shooting took place — she's in shock right now and she's being taken out by SWAT,” Mr Leffler said. “She saw multiple dead bodies.”

The attack occurred right before students were to be dismissed for the day, sending the school into lockdown. Some students hid in classrooms until they were rescued by police in tactical gear, friends and family members told Reuters.

A suspect has been taken into custody by law enforcement.

“My daughter, as of right now, she's still trapped in a closet. She's afraid to speak”, a man who identified himself as Caesar Figueroa and said his daughter was inside the school, told CBS News.

“I told her, ‘Don't call me, because I don't want no one to hear your voice.’ So, she's still trapped in a closet in there,” he said.

McKenzie Hartley, who identified herself as the sister of a student at the school described the scene in a text message to Reuters: “She heard him shooting through the windows of classrooms and two students were shot.”

Geovanni Vilsant told the Miami Herald that there were three bloody bodies on the floor as he was fleeing the school.

“There was blood everywhere,” he said. “They weren’t moving.”

One high school senior elsewhere at the school said to the newspaper that there were “SWAT teams everywhere with big guns, cops everywhere, helicopters.”

Victoria Olvera, a junior, was able to walk out of the school after getting clearance by police officers. She told the Herald that she was in history when she heard shots.

“Everyone started running,” she said.

The Broward County sheriff's office said on Twitter that there were “at least 14 victims”. It did not make clear if that number included people who were wounded in addition to the dead.