A teenager has pleaded guilty to the murder of two people and wounding seven others in a mass shooting at a high school in a remote aboriginal community in western Canada earlier this year.
The 18-year-old, whose name was not released under Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act, also admitted to killing two brothers in a nearby home in northern Saskatchewan.
The teenager yesterday entered guilty pleas to first- degree murder in the shooting deaths of two teachers at his school in La Loche, Saskatchewan and to second-degree murder in the deaths of two teenage brothers in the remote Dene community on January 22.
Provincial court Judge Janet McIvor said the courts still need to determine if he should be sentenced as a youth or an adult.
The maximum youth sentence for first-degree murder is 10 years in custody and an adult receives an automatic life sentence.
Mass shootings are rare in Canada, which has stricter gun laws than the United States, and this was Canada’s worst mass shooting at a high school or elementary school.
It is the country’s worst school shooting since the Ecole Polytechnique university massacre in Montreal in 1989, in which 15 people including the shooter died and another 14 were wounded.
