The officer was later shot and killed by fellow police.

News reports from Crandon, a close-knit town of 2,000 people, suggested that the suspected gunman and his victims were part of the same circle of friends — high school students and recent graduates, who had gathered for a house party.

For a small town like Crandon, where the victims and the gunmen were all well known, the familiarity, as well as the relative youth of all those involved, compounded the horror of the events.

Those killed at the scene of the party included four women, aged 14 to 18, and two men believed to be 20 years old.

Another man, aged 19, was in hospital in critical condition. Three of the women were still at secondary school. The other three victims had graduated since 2005, school officials told reporters.

The gunman, Tyler Peterson, 20, was also believed to have graduated in 2005 and worked full-time as a deputy sheriff and part-time as a local officer, the local police chief, John Dennee, told reporters. Peterson was off-duty at the time of the shooting.

Local people said there was no sign that Peterson was troubled. “He was an ‘A’ student. He was a good kid,” Frank Bocek, a local resident said.

“You would never have thought this would come from a young kid like that.”Cody Hanson,17, a classmate of two of the victims, was also shocked. “I’ve seen him, I’ve talked to him. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would do that,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The mother of the youngest victim, Lindsey Stahl, 14, told reporters she believed he may have been angry with a former girlfriend.

Love-rage?
“I’m waiting for somebody to wake me up right now. This is a bad, bad dream,” Jenny Stahl told local reporters. “All I heard that it was a jealous boyfriend and he went berserk. He took them all out.” The rampage appears to have started on what should have been a festive weekend — the annual autumn homecoming ritual when recent graduates return to their high school.

A group of friends had gathered in an apartment when the suspected gunman arrived shortly before 3:00 am on Sunday, according to news reports.

Local residents, who lived a few doors away from the house, shown on television behind police barricades on Sunday, described hearing the sounds of gunshots at about 3:00 am.

“I heard probably five or six shots, a short pause and then five or six more,” Marci Franz, a local resident, said.
“I wasn’t sure if it was gunfire initially. I thought some kids were messing around and hitting a nearby metal building.”

Then she heard eight louder shots and tyres squealing, she said.

It was unclear how or when the episode ended but the town mayor, Gary Bradley, told reporters that the gunman had been shot dead by a police sniper, apparently some time after his attack on the party.