Glendale School Shooting Victims Revealed in Tweets and Photos

Many questions remain in last week's tragic murder-suicide at Glendale's Independence High School that left two 15-year-old girls dead, including who pulled the trigger. The bodies of Dorothy Dutiel and May Kieu were found near an administration building on Friday morning, prompting a security lockdown and early release. Glendale police...

By Ray Stern

February 15, 2016

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Many questions remain in last week's tragic murder-suicide that left two 15-year-old girls dead at Glendale's Independence High School, including who pulled the trigger.

The bodies of Dorothy Dutiel and May Kieu were found near an administration building on Friday morning, prompting a security lockdown and early release. Glendale police later deemed the incident a murder-suicide, saying a gun and suicide note had been found near the bodies. Each girl suffered a single gunshot wound.

Students and faculty gathered at the school on Saturday night to say their condolences at a candlelight vigil, confirming the deceased girls' names – which still haven't been released by police. Kieu's sister, a science teacher at the school, started a gofundme.com page to help with funeral expenses.

Authorities haven't revealed whether one girl murdered the other before killing herself, or if the case involved a suicide pact.

The rumor among students, as social media and some news outlets reported, is that Kieu wanted to break off a romantic relationship with Dutiel. Police are silent on that and other theorized scenarios.

Sergeant Tracey Breeden, Glendale police spokeswoman, told news media that no new information about the case – such as how the gun was obtained or even who brought it – would be released until at least Tuesday, after Presidents Day.

What's known by now is that the girls had a serious relationship that they didn't hide on social media. Kieu called Dutiel "my lover" on Dutiel's Instagram page, now offline. Pictures on Kieu's Instagram page and elsewhere show the girls together, seemingly as a couple, sometimes kissing each other on the cheek. And it's known that Dutiel published sometimes dark messages on Twitter, some of which in retrospect seem to foreshadow violence. Her final tweet said simply, "Good bye (:"

She also tweeted in December: "Who else is ready to shoot themselves?"

Here are some of the more notable tweets and photos from the deceased girls' social-media sites:

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Ray Stern is the former news editor of Phoenix New Times. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Arizona for more than two decades. He's won numerous awards for his reporting, including the Arizona Press Club's Don Bolles Award for Investigative Journalism.