A school-shooting incident shook Moscow, Russia on Monday as a high school student shot and killed his teacher and a police officer. CNN reports that 15-year-old Sergey Gordeyev entered School No. 243's premises carrying two of his father's legally-owned rifles - a hunting carbine and a small-bore rifle.

The school's security guard was not able to stop the boy but managed to hit the alarm before the student entered his classroom. He then shot a geography teacher Andrei Nikolayevich and locked about twenty students inside the room.

One of the students, Ivan Chekanov, told Reuters that as Gordoyev knocked on the classroom's door, he and his classmates were unaware of the student's intentions. "We were glad to see him at first - but then he shot the geography teacher," Chekanov said. "He fired the shot, then he got up onto the podium, laid out his rifles and said he had 100 bullets and that had come to die."

Gordeyev then open fired at the police who responded to the scene, killing one and wounding another. The assailant was subdued after the police sent in the boy's father wearing a bulletproof vest to talk to his son and convince him to surrender. The student fired a total of eleven shots during the ordeal.

Fellow students described Gordeyev as a model student and had been recognized for "setting an example for the whole school" in the past. Sakhobudin Tagoyev, a former classmate, said, "The teachers liked and respected him. He was like Einstein."

But Tagoyev also remarked that Gordeyev does not cope well with pressure "if something did not work out for him ... or if he got bad grades." Russian investigators suspect the student may have suffered an emotional breakdown which led to his violent actions.

BBC reports Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin describes the incident as "tragic" and suggests that improvements in Russia's educational system may prevent such incidents. He said, "A new generation of spectators with good artistic taste should be brought up - capable of understanding and appreciating theatrical, dramatic and musical arts," he adds. "Had we been doing this properly, maybe there would have been no tragedies similar to today's tragedy in Moscow."

Here is a video telecast from Reuters during the incident