Students and parents have shared harrowing accounts of survival following a mass shooting at Debsirin Nonthaburi School on the outskirts of Bangkok, an attack that claimed nine lives and left dozens injured in Thailand’s worst mass violence incident in years.
The incident began during the early morning hours when a 14-year-old student fatally shot his grandparents at their home before traveling nearly 18 kilometers to the campus. Arriving shortly before 10 a.m., the gunman opened fire inside school buildings, killing three teachers and two school officials before taking his own life as police moved in.
Inside the classrooms, students and teachers reacted quickly to the sounds of gunfire. Initial confusion turned to terror as internal messaging groups confirmed an active shooter on campus. Instructors guided pupils to barricade doors using heavy wooden desks, extinguish interior lights, and hide near windows to avoid detection.
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Communication was kept strictly to text messages to prevent phone alerts from exposing hiding locations. Students monitored social media groups for updates and images tracking the assailant’s movement between classroom buildings while sheltering in place.
Parents watching from afar attempted to guide their children through the crisis over the phone. One mother, a healthcare worker receiving real-time updates from her trapped daughter, advised her child to count individual gunshots to estimate when the firearm’s magazine might be empty, while simultaneously relaying precise floor coordinates to police dispatchers.
The shooting renewed national debates over firearm accessibility and campus safety in Thailand, leading to swift administrative reviews of national gun permitting processes and security protocol across education facilities.
