AP - A 15-year-old boy shot by police while brandishing a toy gun in a middle school bathroom is clinically brain dead but being kept alive to harvest his organs, his family's lawyer said.
Christopher Penley is expected to die on Saturday night (Sunday AEST), said family lawyer Mark Nation.
"His organs are in the process of being harvested," Nation told reporters outside a hospital.
Earlier, Kelly Swofford, a family spokeswoman and neighbour of the boy's parents Ralph and Donna Penley, had said the boy had died and that the family was "devastated".
Penley, of Winter Springs, Florida, was accused of pulling the pellet gun in a classroom on Friday and pointing it at other students before forcing one into a closet, then leading deputies and members of a police elite unit on a chase which ended in a school bathroom.
When he raised the gun at a deputy, a police elite unit member shot him, authorities said.
Officers who had responded to the 1,100-student school in suburban Orlando, Florida, believed the gun was a Beretta 9mm, and did not learn until after the shooting that it was a pellet gun.
On Friday night police said that the boy was on "advanced life support". The hospital has refused to release any information.
"Everybody in the whole neighbourhood is really upset," Paul Cavallini, who lives across the street from the Penleys, said.
"He was a quiet kid - polite and everything. He was just a normal teenager."
However, friends and investigators say he was also bullied and emotionally distraught, and went to school that day expecting to die.
Patrick Lafferty, a 15-year-old neighbour who has known Penley about six years, said he was not surprised by what happened. He said Penley was a loner who "told me he wanted to kill himself dozens of times".
"He would put his headphones on and walk up and down the street and he would work out a lot," preferring to keep to himself, Lafferty said.
Swofford said the boy had run away from home several times. Her 11-year-old son, Jeffery Swofford, said Penley had said he had something planned.
"He said: 'I hope I die today because I don't really like my life,'" Jeffery Swofford said.
At a news conference following the shooting at suburban Orlando's Milwee Middle School, authorities put the toy gun side-by-side with a Beretta. It appeared to have black paint covering the red or pink markings on the muzzle that may have indicated to officers that it was a nonlethal weapon.
"As you can see, it doesn't take a professional to see how close this looks to the real thing. I would not be able to tell the difference," said Joyce Dawley, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement special agent in charge of the investigation.
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