The Associated Press

LOUISVILLE, Ky.—A mother killed her two children and later went to the nearby college she attended and brandished a gun Thursday before handing the weapon to a health counselor, police said.

The threat at the University of Louisville ended with no injuries about half an hour after it began, but police who were then asked by school officials to check on the children found them dead with gunshot wounds.

Gail Lynn Coontz, 37, is charged with killing 14-year-old Greg Coontz and 10-year-old Nikki Coontz, said Louisville police Officer Phil Russell.

Gail Coontz was the armed student, said police Lt. Barry Wilkerson. She is in custody at the University of Louisville hospital but is expected to be transferred to jail, Russell said.

The woman was also charged with one count of terroristic threatening for pointing a handgun at an officer, said university police Maj. Kenny Brown. The woman gave her handgun to a counselor at the health services building, he said.

“When we were able to open the door and go in, the student and the counselor were both sitting on the couch,” Brown said.

The children were shot sometime in the past day, Russell said, declining to say where their bodies were found in the house. He didn’t cite a motive.

Coontz has been a student in the college of arts and sciences since fall 2006 and had not declared a major, said university spokesman John Drees.

The school sent safety alerts to student phones, cell phones and posted one on its Website. The campus was not locked down, university spokeswoman Cindy Hess said.

The two-story red brick home where the children were found is in a tidy middle-class neighborhood.

A garden at the home has a statue of two children playing with a bicycle. The neighborhood is about 10 miles south of the university.

The neighborhood is normally quiet and the neighbors generally know one another, said neighbor Patty Schneider.

“It just all seems like it’s going to be a bad dream and I’m going to wake up from it,” said Schneider, who lives directly across the street. “How am I ever going to look out the front of my house again?”