Police are investigating the possible connection between the shooting of a child in Maryland today to a series of seven shootings in the area last week.
A 13-year-old student was shot in the torso while standing in front of his school in Bowie, Maryland in Prince George's County, east of Washington at 8:09 a.m. (1209 GMT).
A Prince George's County police spokeswoman told local media that witnesses, including the boy's mother, heard a single loud gunshot and then heard him screaming.
She drove him to a local hospital and he was quickly airlifted to a hospital in Washington, but his condition was unclear, police said.
Meanwhile, local and federal authorities stepped up a massive, multi-state hunt for a suspect who killed six people in and near Washington in the past few days.
Five people were killed within a few miles of each other in the space of 16 hours late Wednesday and early Thursday in Montgomery County, an affluent suburb bordering Washington on the north.
The sixth victim, a 72-year-old man, was shot in the chest on Thursday while standing on a street corner in Washington, close to the Maryland state border. On Friday, a woman who was shot in the back as she loaded packages into her car in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Fredericksburg, Virginia, south of Washington. She is in serious condition at a Virginia hospital.
Mr Charles Moose, chief of police of neighbouring Montgomery County, said they were working on 952 "credible leads" into the shootings.
Investigators believe that in each apparently random attack a single shot was fired from a high-power firearm at some distance from the unsuspecting victim.
Authorities said ballistics tests linked five out of the seven shootings. Bullets that killed two additional victims were in poor shape, making it difficult to link them conclusively to the other shootings, officials said.
AFP