Santa Fe student opens fire in school, kills 13-year-old classmate

Santa Fe province is in shock after a student, 15, opened fire inside his school and killed a 13-year-old boy. Two other injured students were hospitalized. The shooting took place in a public school in San Cristóbal, a city north of the capital of Santa Fe, minutes after the school opened at 7 a.m. on Monday. According to what students and their parents said in TV interviews, the 15-year-old boy brought a shotgun to school inside a guitar case. According to their testimonies, he stepped out of the bathroom with the gun and began shooting at the students who were getting ready to enter their classrooms after yelling “surprise,” apparently with no clear target. The boy who was killed was walking down a hall when he was shot, they said. Municipal control staff detected something was happening after noticing in CCTV live footage that “all students were running out of the school,” said San Cristóbal government secretary Ramiro Muñoz in an interview with Infobae En Vivo streaming channel. Muñoz confirmed that an unidentified school staff member was able to disarm the student, and that the boy is currently under the custody of local authorities. Two other students, reportedly aged 13 and 15, were also injured, but Muñoz said they are not in danger. Santa Fe Governor Maximiliano Pullaro confirmed to the press that the 15-year-old took an Ithaca shotgun to school. “He hurt two classmates and caused the death of a 13-year-old child.” Videos taken by students show children trying to flee the school, screaming in fear, while shots can be heard inside the building. San Cristóbal. Las Imágenes de lo que ocurría en la escuela normal Mariano Moreno de San Cristóbal. Esta mañana un alumno de primer año mató a otros a balazos dentro del establecimiento. pic.twitter.com/gYsEyBacZQ— Mario Galoppo (@mariogaloppo) March 30, 2026 María, a student at the school, told news channel A24 that she was in her classroom on the first floor of the building when she heard a noise. She thought someone had jumped on an empty juice box, causing an exploding sound. “I never imagined that it was a shot. When everyone started saying there were shots, we started running and breaking the glasses to escape through the back,” she said. Muñoz added that his team spoke with teachers and they said the suspect was a “good student” and “had never had behavioural problems.” Carlos, the father of a fellow student of the school, said the boy seemed to be “an easy-going kid” and did not appear to have issues. A video of the attacker allegedly suffering bullying surfaced online, but the man said that neither he nor the school were aware of such situations. “Last night I delivered food to him. You don’t expect someone like that to get up and kill one of his classmates the next morning,” the man said. A growing problem Although school shootings are very rare in Argentina, a slew of recent reports indicate that the problem might be on the rise. In recent months, Argentina’s Federal Police intervened to stop three potential school shootings after receiving an alert from the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) about the possibility of the attacks based on suspicious online posts. The most renowned and deadly case occurred in 2004 in Carmen de Patagones, the southernmost city of Buenos Aires province, when a student named Rafael Solich shot eight of his classmates, killing three of them. Since he became president, Javier Milei has loosened regulations on gun ownership, making it easier for civilians to legally access them. He has also lowered the legal age threshold from 21 to 18 for owning and carrying a gun. Last February, the Argentine Congress lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 14. However, the law will enter into force in six months, meaning that the attacker will not be punished for the crime as an adult.