Police say a shooting inside a Los Angeles middle school classroom that left four children injured was accidental.
A 12-year-old girl was arrested after gunfire erupted at Salvador Castro Middle School on Thursday morning.
Los Angeles police spokesman Josh Rubenstein says the girl has since been charged with negligent discharge of a firearm on school grounds.
The charge comes after one of the girl’s classmates, also 12, revealed he spoke to her moments after the gun went off and said she was sobbing and repeatedly saying: ‘I didn’t mean it.’
She told him the gun was in her backpack and that it accidentally went off when she dropped the bag.
Another classmate also said the girl didn’t mean to hurt anyone, saying she thought it was a toy gun.
The shooting left one teenager critically wounded and three other children injured.
The 12-year-old girl arrested over a shooting at Salvador Castro Middle School on Thursday morning has now been charged with accidentally firing the gun
A 15-year-old male who was shot in the temple is in a stable condition and doctor have said he ‘was extremely lucky’. A girl, also 15, is in a fair condition after suffering a gunshot wound to her wrist.
An 11-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl were grazed and were treated and released from the hospital. A woman, 30, was also injured and treated in hospital.
Police arrested the girl and recovered the gun immediately after the shooting.
News footage showed a dark-haired girl in a sweatshirt being led from the school in handcuffs as anxious parents and family members gathered on a street corner.
It comes as parents and officials question how the student was able to get access to a gun and bring it to the school.
‘We do not know yet… how our young person on this campus ended up having the ability to have access to a firearm and bring it onto campus,’ Los Angeles School Police Chief Steve Zipperman said.
‘We have laws that mandate that parents who own guns, any adult who owns a gun, any gun owner, has an obligation to ensure that gun is locked inside a home.
‘One of the main missions we will have and we will continue to enforce is the issue of finding out how a young person had access to a weapon, and I assure you, if we find out it came from an adult from a home, that the proper prosecutorial procedures will occur.’
News footage showed a dark-haired girl in a sweatshirt being led from the school in handcuffs as anxious parents and family members gathered on a street corner
One of the victims is seen being loaded into an ambulance after the morning shooting. A 15-year-old boy was shot in the head and is in stable condition while a girl, also 15, was shot in the wrist and is in fair condition
Concerned parents lined up near the school on Thursday morning after the shooting as they waited for news on their children
Students at the school are seen evacuating with the help of police after the gunfire erupted
The district itself has a policy requiring every middle and high school campus to conduct daily random searches by metal-detector wands at different hours of the school day for students in the sixth grade and up.
A 13-year-old student, Melanie Valencia, said the school did a random security search on Thursday but she has never been searched.
‘It’s crazy because I don’t know how she got the gun,’ she said.
The school’s campus was placed on lockdown but most classes continued. The school has about 365 students in grades 6-8 and almost all are Hispanic and many are from low-income families.
At the end of the school day, children were escorted individually out of the school.
Many were crying as they were embraced by emotional parents.
Authorities said earlier in the day that the call came in from Salvador Castro Middle School, which brought confusion seeing as the two most injured victims were of high school age.
NBC LA later reported that the shooting took place in a mixed-grade elective class. It is possible that students can take the same electives if the high school and middle school is on the same campus.
The school building used to be used by Belmont High when more students attended.
After police secured the school, classes went back on as usual, but parents were allowed to pick their children up early if they wanted to
Elizabeth Acevedo and her son Andres, three, are pictured waiting for news of her son, Jose, an 8th grade student at the high school
Another parent reacts while crossing the street past police vehicles outside a roadblock to Salvadore Castro Middle School in Los Angeles on Thursday
As soon as news of the shooting broke, parents rushed to the school to confirm their children were safe
Diego Salinas said he had just dropped his 12-year-old sister at the school and was stunned when she called minutes later to say there had been a shooting.
‘There were so many things crossing my mind,’ said Salinas, who was still shaking hours later.
‘I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run. I wanted do so many things.’
Claudia Anzueto said her 12-year-old son was crying when he called her from a borrowed cellphone. He said he heard a gunshot in the next classroom and knew the suspect.
‘Not safe, very insecure,’ said Anzueto, who said there were no metal detectors at the school.
‘I fear for my son’s life. You know what I mean, you really hear about things like this in the news, and just to hear that something like that happened so close to home, it scared the life out of me.’
Above, another look at concerned parents waiting for word from police at the school
Parents and officials have questioned how the student was able to get access to a gun and bring it to the school
The Los Angeles Unified School District has been conducting daily random searches for weapons using metal detective wands ever since 1993, when two students were killed in back-to-back shootings.
However, an audit last April of 20 schools found that some schools failed to do the searches daily and that a quarter of them didn’t have the right metal-detecting wands.
FEMALE SCHOOL SHOOTERS: A RARITY
One of the first school shooters was female – Brenda Spencer
The fact that a female student was taken into custody was surprising since females do not usually commit school shootings or mass shootings in general.
However, they aren’t unheard of. One of the first modern school shooters was a girl. In 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer shot and killed the principal and custodian at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, a school across the street from where she lived. When a reporter asked why she did it, Spencer said ‘I don’t like Mondays’.
When it comes to traditional school shootings, involving a perpetrator who attends the school that is targeted, men have always been the shooter in the U.S.
In general, women are less violent than men – accounting for just 10 to 13 per cent of all homicides. And in the rare situations in which women do commit violent crimes, they are less likely to use a gun.
Jocelyn Lopez told KTLA that her 13-year-old younger sister, a 7th grader, was in the classroom where the shooting took place.
She said her sister was fine and had been texting with her.
The fact that a female student had been taken into custody was surprising for many since it is historically more common for males to be behind school or mass shootings in general.
But in saying that, one of the first modern school shooters was a girl.
In 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer shot and killed the principal and custodian at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego – the school across the street from where she lived.
When a reporter asked Spencer why she did it, she said ‘I don’t like Mondays’.
There are a few other examples including 30-year-old Laurie Dann. She shot and killed a boy and injured five other students at an elementary school in Winnetka, Illinois in 1988.
Jillian Robbins, a 19-year-old Army-trained sharpshooter, shot and killed one 21-year-old student and wounded three more at Penn State University in 1996.
Two students at Louisiana Technical Institute were shot and killed by 23-year-old nursing student Latina Williams in 2008.
In 2010, a biology professor at the University of Alabama shot six of her colleagues.
In 2014, a 17-year-old girl in Pennsylvania was arrested after cops discovered she was planning an attack on her high school and wanted to be ‘the first female shooter’.
In another troubling incident in 2016, two teens at a high school in Arizona died from the same bullet, in an apparent murder suicide.
But when it comes to traditional school shootings, involving a perpetrator who attends the school that is targeted, men have always been the shooter in the U.S.
In general, women are less violent than men – accounting for just 10 to 13 per cent of all homicides, according to LiveScience.com.
And in the rare situations in which women do commit violent crimes, they are less likely to use a gun. Women perpetrators account for just eight per cent of firearm crimes, while taking up a more predominant 40 per cent of poisonings.
Above, a view of the joint Belmont High/Salvador Castro Middle School campus in the Las Angeles neighborhood of Westlake