Austria Mourns After a Deadly School Shooting

Classes are canceled for at least a week, ​but students kept coming to their school on Wednesday morning, the day after a deadly shooting there stunned Austria.

They gathered across the street from the high school, in Graz, where a former student killed at least 10 people on Tuesday, in a spot cordoned off from other mourners, well-wishers and reporters.

They were struggling, like so many of their compatriots, to make sense of the sort of violence they see on television from America but never expected to see in their own quiet Alpine city.

“We’re just speechless — this seems to have come from nowhere,” said Simone Saccon, 20, a university student who has spent his life in Graz. He lives near the school, the BORG Dreierschützengasse, and was among those gathered outside on Wednesday.

“It’s something you imagine happens in major cities or in the U.S., but that it would happen here?” he added.

Austria was a nation in mourning on Wednesday. Black flags flapped atop the public trams in Graz, a well-to-do city that is the nation’s second-largest, after Vienna.