Officials said Wednesday afternoon that the suspected shooter was dead and that two pupils had been hurt in a school shooting in northern California.

Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea told reporters Wednesday night that the injured youngsters, boys aged five and six, are in "extremely critical" condition and receiving treatment at a trauma centre in the Sacramento region.

“The fact that they are being treated by medical staff currently is great,” Honea said. “It’s good that they’re still in a position to be treated. But we’re not out of the woods yet.”

He added that law enforcement is confident that they know who the shooter was and that they found a handgun at the scene, but declined to identify him or discuss a possible motive.

Around 1 p.m., reports emerged of a gunman at the Feather River School of Seventh-Day Adventists in Oroville, a northern California city with 20,000 residents. A California Highway Patrol officer responding to the scene found a man dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and two kindergarten students critically injured.  

While details on the shooter remain limited, authorities believe the attack was targeted due to the school’s affiliation with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The shooter, who arrived via a rideshare service, had scheduled a meeting days earlier with an administrator to discuss enrolling a family member. Although the appointment seemed routine, investigators suspect it may have been a pretext to gain access to the school.

Butte county’s district attorney and the head of the FBI’s Sacramento field office joined Honea at the press conference to highlight the investigative help they plan to offer local law enforcement and the victim services they say they will deliver to the families of the injured students and the other children affected by the shooting.

Buses arrived at the school on Wednesday afternoon to transport students and reunite them with their parents. Chaplains and crisis counselors would be available to help those affected, Honea said.

Oroville was the site of a high-profile shooting in 2022 when a man opened fire on a Greyhound bus bound for Los Angeles, killing one person, a 43-year old traveling with her two children, and injuring four others, including a pregnant woman.

“Here we are again in Butte county dealing with another major incident, major tragedy,” Honea said. “This community has endured so much in the last three years, it’s hard to believe we’re back here again.”

The region has found itself in the national spotlight repeatedly in recent years, largely because of highly destructive and often deadly wildfires, including the 2018 Camp fire that killed 85 people, which Honea gestured to in his remarks to reporters outside the Feather River School.

“This is another tragedy that has been visited upon our community,” he said. “I hope people can appreciate how tough this is for the students of this school, the faculty of the school, the members of this community, all the first responders.”