1997 Pearl High School shooting
School shooting in Rankin County, Mississippi
On October 1, 1997, a mass shooting took place at Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi, United States. Two students were killed and seven others were injured before the perpetrator, 16-year-old 11th grade student Luke Woodham, was apprehended by an armed faculty member. The victims included Woodham's ex-girlfriend and prior to the shooting, he had killed his mother by bludgeoning and stabbing at their home.
Woodham was convicted of murder and attempted murder, for which he was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment and an additional 140 years respectively. Six other students were arrested as potential co-conspirators, but charges were dropped against five of the students, who were minors, while an 18-year-old group member sentenced to six months of boot camp and five years probation.
Shooting
The incident began on the morning of October 1, 1997, when Luke Woodham (born February 5, 1981) fatally stabbed and bludgeoned his mother, 50-year-old Mary Ann Woodham, as she prepared for a morning jog. An autopsy report revealed that she had eleven slash wounds and seven stab wounds, including stab wounds to the heart and lungs. At his trial, Woodham claimed that he could not remember killing his mother.
Woodham then drove his mother's Toyota Tercel to Pearl High School. Wearing a trench coat to conceal the rifle he was carrying, Woodham entered the school and gave a manifesto to Justin Sledge.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1997 Pearl High School shooting” is school shooting in Rankin County, Mississippi. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Pearl, High and School, not as a finished interpretation.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17489133. Authority coordinates are 32.276, -90.131. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997 and 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “1997 Pearl High School shooting” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.