On Saturday morning, the entrance to Debsirin Nonthaburi School was quiet, a day after a 14-year-old student opened fire inside the school and killed five staff members. Police maintained only a limited presence at the gate, while a few mourners arrived to lay flowers. Some parents returned with their children to collect belongings left behind when the shooting abruptly ended the school day.
For a community accustomed to the ordinary rhythms of classes, tutoring and school routines, the scene offered a stark contrast to the violence that had unfolded less than 24 hours earlier.
The teenager had begun the day at his grandparents' home, where police said he shot and killed both of them. He then went to Debsirin Nonthaburi School, in Nonthaburi province northwest of Bangkok, carrying a handgun that officials said was legally registered to his grandfather. During the morning, he opened fire inside the school, killing five staff members and wounding students and others before shooting himself. He was taken to hospital but later died.
The attack has left families confronting both immediate loss and the uncertainty of what comes next for children who witnessed or experienced the violence.
The Health Ministry said on Saturday that 16 people remained hospitalized, seven of them in critical condition. Most of those wounded were between 12 and 14 years old.
A father who brought his son to retrieve belongings told the Associated Press that the boy remained in shock after being at the school during the shooting and could not sleep alone. The father declined to be identified.
For teachers, the attack also shattered assumptions about the safety of a place built around education and routine.
Prompong Namwong, an English teacher, told the Guardian that a student from another class rushed into his classroom seeking somewhere to hide. Prompong said he saw the attacker run past and thought he was going to die. Later, messages in the school's group chat informed him that some of his colleagues had been killed. “My life has to go on, but right now ... it's a very great shock,” he said.
Pichanan Thiengtham, an art teacher, was in the teachers' lounge when she heard the gunfire. She initially struggled to believe the sound was coming from a firearm. After seeing an injured student, she helped take the child for first aid and transfer them to hospital care within the school building, according to the Guardian.
Emergency workers arriving while the attack was still underway faced the same uncertainty. Kiatikhun Verapongpradith, 47, told Reuters that his team had to assess what weapon the attacker possessed before moving deeper into the building. Police officers eventually advanced behind shields while other personnel evacuated students and teachers.
Police said the teenager first targeted teachers on the sixth floor of the building where he studied. Three teachers were killed there, according to Nonthaburi provincial police commander Dejrapee Kongdee. The teenager then encountered the school's deputy director and the director's secretary on a staircase and shot them, police said. He later entered another building and was found on its fourth floor after shooting himself.
By the time police secured the school, the teenager had fired at least 26 rounds. Officers found another 34 rounds in his possession, according to police.
The reasons behind the attack remain unresolved. Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said the teenager had been stressed by his studies and that the shooting appeared deliberate and planned. Police described him as quiet, not particularly sociable and academically capable. Officials also said he attended weekend tutoring and had played shooting games late at night. None of those details, however, establishes a single cause for the violence.
The school community now has to absorb those unanswered questions alongside the practical consequences of the attack. Debsirin Nonthaburi announced that classes would be suspended from Aug. 10 through Aug. 14, with staff instructed to work from home.
On Saturday, relatives were also beginning another difficult task: collecting the bodies of those killed.
All eight bodies connected to the shootings — the five school staff members, the teenager and his two grandparents — had been collected from Bangkok's Institute of Forensic Medicine by early Saturday afternoon, according to the Associated Press. The institute's director said most victims had suffered a single fatal gunshot wound to a vital area. More detailed forensic findings, including toxicology results, were still pending.
The violence has also reopened a national debate over firearms. Reuters reported that Thailand has roughly 15 civilian firearms for every 100 residents, making it one of Southeast Asia's largest gun-owning countries. Anutin said he would propose new legislation restricting the carrying of firearms by members of the public, after previously tightening gun laws while serving as interior minister.
The debate comes after other high-profile shootings in Thailand, including a February attack at a public high school in southern Thailand in which a 17-year-old opened fire and briefly took people hostage, killing one person and injuring two others.
At Debsirin Nonthaburi, however, the national argument remained distant from the families standing outside the school. Charin Siriananchai brought his two young sons to pay their respects even though they did not attend the school. He told the Associated Press that he lived nearby and passed the school almost every day.
“Everyone was saddened and shocked,” he said, describing the attack as unexpected and the loss as profound.
For the school community, the next days will be defined less by the questions surrounding the attack than by the people left to recover from it: injured students in hospital, families preparing funerals, teachers facing classrooms that may soon reopen, and children returning to a place where, until Friday, school had meant little more than an ordinary day.
