A teenager shot and wounded two children and a teacher at an elementary school in South Carolina, before being taken into custody on Wednesday, police said.
The shooting happened in the early afternoon at Townville Elementary School in Anderson County, located near the Georgia state line about 100 miles (160 km) northeast of Atlanta.
The dead body of an adult was found near the school, Anderson County Coroner Greg Shore told the Anderson Independent Mail, adding that the death appeared to be related to the shooting.
One of the injured students was in serious condition and the other was stable, Fox Carolina reported. Both children are six years old, according to the Independent Mail.
Police are expected to hold a news conference at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT).
Juana Slade, spokeswoman for AnMed Health Medical Center, said they were treating one adult woman and a boy. Both were in good condition, Slade said.
One child was flown to Greenville Memorial Hospital's emergency trauma center, health system spokeswoman Sandy Dees said.
The United States has long been plagued by shootings at schools and colleges, which has fuelled the debate about access to guns in America.
Armed officers guarded students as they were evacuated from the school and taken by bus to a nearby church, local media said. Television images showed police swarming the school, with some officers on the roof while others moved around the building.
A mother whose daughter is in kindergarten at Townville Elementary told WYFF news that she panicked after getting word of the shooting. Her daughter is OK but described a scene of scared and crying children.
"I'm just scared," the woman, who was not identified, said through tears as she was interviewed by WYFF. "I don't even want her to go to school now."
The two injured students were airlifted to the hospital and the teacher was driven by ambulance, said Taylor Jones, deputy chief of the Anderson County Sheriff's Office.
Further details were not immediately available and Reuters could not immediately reach the coroner or the Anderson County Sheriff's Office for comment.
About 280 students attend the school and 64 percent receive subsidized lunches, according to online real estate database company Zillow.
Governor Nikki Haley said the state would work to ensure local law enforcement had the support they needed to investigate what happened.
In 2012, a gunman shot dead 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The deadliest mass school shooting was in 2007, when a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University.
Earlier this month, a 14-year-old girl shot and wounded a fellow student at a rural Texas high school and then died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
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