New police report reveals St. Louis school shooter’s troubled decline

ST. LOUIS — Police on Monday released their final report about a deadly shooting at a south city high school campus, providing the most comprehensive and detailed account of the 2022 attack to date.

The 432-page document compiles dozens of interviews with officers, teachers, students and family about that morning inside Central Visual and Performing Arts High School and the Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience on South Kingshighway.

The interviews paint a chaotic scene as 19-year-old Orlando Harris stalked the school with a Palmetto State Armory semi-automatic rifle and bags of ammunition. Students described jumping out of a third-story window, watching Harris try to break through their locked classroom doors and even running past Harris after his gun jammed while in a dance studio.

They also reveal for the first time publicly just how troubled Harris was and just how much he struggled with depression, including multiple suicide attempts, hospital commitments and required sessions with a psychiatrist.

Two months before the shooting, the 2021 CVPA graduate told psychiatrist Dr. Hetal Patel that he had thought about shooting people at his old high school.

“(Harris) told her that the thought lasted one evening and then went away,” police wrote in interview notes. “No planning. Didn’t want to do it and hadn’t thought about doing it since that evening.”

But investigators found a 60-day countdown to the shooting in a pink spiral notebook that Harris used as a manifesto, which also spelled out his overarching motive to target LGBTQ+ teachers and students. He also wrote that he wanted to kill his family by setting fire to their house while they were inside — two facts also revealed for the first time publicly on Monday.

Harris shot seven people at the school on Oct. 24, 2022, including student Alexzandria Bell and teacher Jean Kuczka, who both died. Neither of them knew Harris, nor did most of the students who saw him during the shooting, according to Monday’s report.

In the aftermath of the attack, people who knew Harris painted a picture to police of an odd but quiet boy who wore fingerless gloves and black hoodies to school and loved to help elderly people through his food service job at Cardinal Ritter Senior Services. But, they said, something major shifted in him in 2021 when he went back to school after a year of COVID shutdowns.

His mother, Tanya Ward, told police Harris had tried to kill himself multiple times since August 2021, when he tried to cut his wrists after leaving a note for his co-workers to find. That was two weeks before he was supposed to start college at an out-of-state school, police wrote.

After surviving that attempt, he’d gone through a weeks-long inpatient psychiatric treatment. But in November he again had suicidal thoughts and was hospitalized. He was released before Christmas, his mom told police.

Then, after he drank antifreeze in July 2022, he was referred to Patel. Patel held two therapy sessions with him in August of that year. The Washington University doctor said he “had skewed expectations of himself and thought he was a failure.” She prescribed him medication for his mental health, but she told police she discovered he had not filled the prescriptions.

She, like others, said Harris took a turn for the worst in 2021 when he lost interest in things he enjoyed such as video gaming. She encouraged him to continue with psychotherapy treatment, but he told her it had not helped him in the past.

Harris did not show up for his session with Patel in September, police wrote, and her clinic could not get ahold of him Oct. 11 when they reached out.

Most who knew Harris socially or through work said he was dependable and friendly, but a few said he had “a bad home life.” No one recalled Harris as being particularly angry or threatening; even Patel said he didn’t get angry during their sessions.

But on Oct. 15, just nine days before the shooting, Harris’ family said they discovered he was receiving packages from gun and ammunition sellers. His sisters and mother, with whom he lived, got concerned.

Ward, his mother, said she hid the packages. Later, Harris’ sister opened them up to find a body armor vest, ammunition magazines and magazine holsters.

That’s when Ward checked her son’s bank statement and found that Harris had been purchasing guns and tactical gear, and she discovered he went to a gun show.

The gun he used in the shooting had been purchased through a private seller. A police detective and two FBI agents interviewed the seller after the shooting; he said Harris did not raise any red flags during their exchange.

Ward said she called police, who came to her house and told her they could not legally take Harris’ guns away.

Days after the shooting, the Post-Dispatch reported the gun that night had been taken from him and given to a third party but somehow ended up back in Harris’ possession, and was then placed in a storage facility.

In Monday’s report, Ward’s interview disputed that account.

Instead, it said Harris began to argue with Ward, while police were at the home, “that he worked hard to earn the money to purchase the gun and that he wanted to keep it,” police wrote.

But he also agreed to “appease his mother and the entire family” by purchasing a storage facility to store the gun, ammunition and tactical gear.

His sister Noneeka Harris told police she drove her brother to the Extra Space Storage facility on Watson Road in Shrewsbury, where he put the gear.

“Noneeka Harris stated that she knew something was going to happen,” police wrote in the report. “She asked Orlando H. what he was going to do with the gun. He simply told her that he was going to the shooting range.”

A few days later, Harris gave a co-worker a ride home after their shift. It was two days prior to the shooting. During that car ride, Harris told his co-worker “he wasn’t coming back.”

On Oct. 24, the day of the shooting, Ward said she got home from her nightshift at 7 a.m. to find her son was gone. He normally slept until noon.

At the school, the owner of a construction company working across the street told police he thought it was odd when he saw Harris sitting there in his sister’s blue Dodge Avenger at 5:30 a.m.

At 9:01 a.m., dressed all in black, carrying “20 fully loaded magazines,” Harris pulled up again to the school.

Twenty-four minutes later, he was gunned down by police in a third-story computer lab.

Hours later, FBI discovered the storage unit. It was empty.