A 14-year-old boy shot and killed two men and then wounded himself during a deer hunting trip in northeastern Oregon, the county sheriff said Thursday.
The teen was staying with at least three other men — all from Baker City, Ore. — at a cabin on private property off a U.S. Forest Service road in the Blue Mountains when the shootings took place.
Grant County Sheriff Glenn Palmer, characterizing the cabin area as a crime scene, said in a statement that the teen fled the cabin after shooting the men and then apparently accidentally shot himself in the right leg.
The boy returned to the cabin and pleaded for help from another man in the hunting party, Palmer said, but instead the man held the teen at gunpoint, forced him to get on the floor and then used duct tape to bind him to a chair.
The names of the men who were killed were not released because family had not yet been notified, but authorities listed their ages as 43 and 64 years old.
According to the sheriff’s statement the owner of the cabin drove to the nearby town of Granite and was able to call police and an ambulance just after midnight on Wednesday.
The teen was taken to a Baker City hospital then flown to a Boise, Idaho, medical center for further treatment. Linda Payne Smith, spokeswoman for St. Alphonsus Hospital in Boise told The Associated Press on Thursday evening she could not say whether the boy remained at the hospital or what his condition was.
Palmer did not say if an arrest had been made, or provide the boy’s relationship to the two dead men, but said more information would be provided at a later time.
The Associated Press contributed to this report