CHARDON, Ohio – The teenager suspected in an Ohio school shooting struggled with a broken family and did poorly in school, then appeared to turn himself around once he was taken in by grandparents and began to attend an alternative school, longtime neighbors and friends said Wednesday.

To a person, they expressed disbelief at how the quiet but friendly boy could now be a suspect in a shooting that left three people dead and appears to have involved a gun that disappeared from his grandfather’s barn.

“T.J. was a very fine person,” Carl Henderson, a longtime neighbor of the suspect’s grandparents, Thomas and Michelle Lane, said Wednesday. “Nice-looking man, very friendly, spoke to you, carried a conversation with you.”

Lane, 17, admitted taking the .22-caliber revolver and a knife to the 1,100-student Chardon High and firing 10 shots at a group of students sitting at a cafeteria table, prosecutor David Joyce said.

Lane came from a broken family but seemed to heal over time, said Henderson, who added that the boy began living with his grandparents off and on several years ago.

Lane’s father, Thomas Lane, 40, served seven months in prison in 2003 on charges of disrupting public service and felonious assault, according to state prison records.

Joyce described suspect Lane as “someone who’s not well” and said the teen didn’t know the victims but chose them randomly.