A 14-year-old killed his grandparents, then opened fire at his school near Bangkok
It happened on Friday at Debsirin Nonthaburi School in Bang Kruai. The toll settled at nine dead including the gunman, with around thirty injured. It is Thailand's worst attack of its kind since 2022.
It happened on Friday morning in Bang Kruai, in Nonthaburi province north of Bangkok. A 14-year-old student killed his grandparents at home, then went to Debsirin Nonthaburi School, where he opened fire before taking his own life.
The counts moved around all Friday and only settled on Saturday: nine dead in all, the gunman included. Five people were killed inside the school — two teachers and three other staff, among them the deputy director — and the grandparents were found dead at home in Bang Bua Thong. A 12-year-old girl wounded in the attack died the next day. Of the roughly thirty injured, fourteen were still in hospital on Saturday, seven of them critically.
The weapon was a 9mm CZ pistol registered to the grandfather, taken from a cabinet along with the ammunition. The Royal Thai Police are leading the investigation, and counted at least 26 shots fired inside the building.
What happens next
The education ministry has closed the school temporarily. Authorities announced payments to those affected: twenty thousand baht for each person killed and five thousand baht for each person injured.
It is the deadliest attack of its kind in Thailand since 2022, when a former police officer killed 38 people, most of them children, at a daycare centre in Nong Bua Lamphu. That case pushed the country to revisit its gun rules and tighten oversight of serving and former officers. The weapon used this time was not a service firearm. It was legally registered inside the family home, the pattern that recurs in many of these cases and that licensing law does not reach.
Thailand has one of the higher rates of civilian gun ownership in Southeast Asia and a licensing system that reads as restrictive on paper. What fails, almost every time, is what happens after the gun is in the house.
No motive has been settled, but investigators have named two threads: the boy was being bullied at school and was under heavy academic pressure. The prime minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, spoke publicly of academic stress. The school has suspended on-site classes from 10 to 14 August.
Image: Aerra Carnicom / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
