CHICAGO – A Chicago school employee was shot and killed in front of an Austin neighborhood elementary school Thursday, though the school day proceeded as scheduled.

Chicago Police told WLS that Nutrition Services employee Denzel Thornton, 25, was shot in the head across the street from Ronald McNair Elementary School shortly after finishing his rounds there around 12:30 p.m.

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“We are working with our partners at CPS security to download and review video camera coverage and to see if there’s any information contained on those videos that could lead us to the identification of the offender and his apprehension,” Chicago Police Chief Gene Roy said.

Thornton was a 2009 graduate of Corliss High School, where he studied culinary arts and earned “hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships,” according to the news site.

He had worked for the school district as a compliance specialist for the last 10 months, and had no criminal history or known gang affiliations, the Chicago Tribune reports.

“It really breaks my heart that this happened to him,” Thornton’s high school culinary arts teacher, David Blackmon, told WLS. “So I’m asking why, why Denzel? Because, you know, he didn’t deserve this.”

Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool issued a statement that contends the shooting “did not have any relationship to the school.”

“On behalf of all Chicago Public Schools, we were devastated to learn today about the tragic death of one of our employees,” the statement read. “Like many CPS employees, he worked hard every day to serve our children.”

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Police scrambled to cover Thornton’s body and process the scene before school let out at 2:30 p.m., and they temporarily placed the building on a lockdown. Parents waited eagerly at a side entrance, where school employees escorted students out of the building Thursday afternoon.

Later in the day, the school hosted an eighth-grade graduation, the Tribune reports.

“People can’t go out without getting hurt,” said KIayla Saffold, whose sisters and cousin attend McNair. “It’s unsafe. On top of that, our babies go here. We don’t want our babies hurt. You can’t take a child o school without someone shooting.”

“Just imagine if kids were coming out,” she added. “It wouldn’t have just been him hurt, might have been several others.”

Local Lavonna Brown said “this was once a place where everybody knew everybody.”

“Everybody grew up as a family,” she said. “Now everyone hates each other. It’s sad.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that through the first five months of 2016, someone was shot in Chicago every 150 minutes, and someone was killed by gunfire every 14 hours.

Through May, there have been 1,400 nonfatal shootings, and 240 shooting related fatalities.

“Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one an hour, topping the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings,” according to the site. “The violence is spilling from the Chicago’s gang-infested South and West Sides into the business district downtown. Lake Shore Drive has seen drive by shootings and robberies.”

The city of Chicago has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation.