Terrified parents besieged a Texas high school on Tuesday after a report of a classroom shooting turned out to be false.
The siege at Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio began around 1 p.m. Tuesday after police received a call about a possible shooting at the school, according to a police statement. The school was cordoned off when police entered and began clearing the campus, but no evidence of active threats or shootings was found.
“Our department and the San Antonio Police Department determined there was no shooting, but then we had to do a methodical room-by-room search with our strike team,” said San Antonio Independent School District Police Chief Johnny Reyes. “We went to them and they said it happened. Where there was a shooting, we were able to quickly determine that there was no shooting.”
Instead, some students were caught in an altercation, but they denied possessing or displaying weapons at any point, Reyes said.
But terrified students have made shocking phone calls to their parents as they poured into the school, where 29 school district officials and 58 city police were present.
A man has cut his arm by shoving his fist through a window in order to enter a school. The police used a tourniquet on his arm. Others were handcuffed and taken into custody after physical confrontations with police, but no arrests were immediately reported.
CBS San Antonio affiliate KENS-TV gets the videofrom inside the school, shows officials sweeping classrooms to ensure the safety of students and staff.
Nehemiah Fernandez, a 14-year-old freshman at Jefferson University, is in class.
“We suddenly heard the sound of the lockdown,” he told KENS. blockade. “
When the school was locked down, Fernandez said, his classroom door was locked and the lights were turned off.
“We just got to the classroom wall,” he said. “We all sat down. I would say 30 minutes passed and we saw two cops come through the door with big heavy guns. It was crazy.”
He texted his mum Amanda Lara to let her know he was safe.
“I do understand the panic, fear and nervousness of parents, especially after the Uwald shooting,” the mom said.
But she didn’t go to school.
The panic is the latest in a wave of such incidents that have occurred since Mass shooting at Uwald Elementary School in Texas on May 24 19 children and 2 teachers were killed. A similar panic erupted on September 13 after Houston Heights High School received threats. Last week’s threat also closed schools in areas around Austin and Houston, as well as in California, Massachusetts, Florida, Arkansas, Oregon, Illinois, Kansas and Oklahoma.
San Antonio District Superintendent Jaime Aquino said the district needs to find better ways to communicate with parents in real time. “I’m assuming that if we didn’t have Uwald, maybe we wouldn’t have a parental reaction. So we just have to understand that,” he said.
