Around 1000 people have attended a candlelight vigil near the Florida school where 19-year-old gunman Nikolas Cruz set off a fire alarm before shooting dead 17 people as classrooms emptied.
The vigil outside the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on Thursday night began with a moment of silence for those slain. Audible sobs rose from the crowd as the names of victims were read out.
Dressed in the school's red colours, some held flowers while others carried signs asking for action to fight school violence, including gun control.
Members of the crowd spontaneously started shouting "no more guns, no more guns" at one point.
"Kids don't need guns. No guns under 21," read one sign.
After around six minutes of shooting Cruz, who had been expelled from the school, ditched his semi-automatic rifle and waslked out of the school.
He was later arrested without a fight elsewhere in Parkland.
Both students and teachers were killed including assistant football coach Aaron Feis, slain while shielding students from bullets and 35-year-old geography teacher Scott Beigel, who helped students enter a locked classroom to avoid the gunman, only to be shot himself.
Ernest Rospierski, a teacher at the school, took several bracing breaths at the vigil as he talked to a reporter about the horror in the school halls.
"Bang bang bang - all of a sudden the shooting stopped," he said. "I looked down. He was reloading. I yelled run. And then I ran behind as many kids as I could."
Authorities have not described any specific motive, except to say that Cruz had been kicked out of the high school.
Students who knew him described him as a volatile teenager whose strange behaviour had caused others to end friendships with him.
Cruz was ordered held without bond at a brief court hearing where his lawyer called him a "broken human being."
Australian Associated Press
