SAN JOSE — Yerba Buena High School was ordered to lock down late Thursday morning after a boy was shot near the campus, according to authorities.
The shooting was reported about 10:43 a.m. south of the campus near Lucretia Avenue and Taji Drive, according to San Jose police. Authorities said that a “male juvenile victim” suffered a non-life threatening gunshot wound.
Police ordered that the high school shelter in place. Officers went to the school, but found that there was “no on-going threat there.”
At 12:52 p.m., police reported that they had found one suspect and recovered a firearm after searing the area.
At 1:15 p.m., police announced that the shelter order for Yerba Buena had been lifted.
Gloria Armas was among several parents and loved ones who went to the school after the report of the shooting, having heard from her 15-year-old niece at Yerba Buena High School that there was a shooting near the school and that the school was sheltering in place.
Armas walked over to the campus to see if she could pick up her niece, but authorities had locked the gates and weren’t allowing anyone inside. She broke down in tears when talking about what could’ve happened to her niece.
“I was freaking out,” she said. “Especially knowing how crazy everything (is) that happens in this world. You really don’t know if your children are safe. It’s really scary.”
Mitchell Sharpe got a call from another parent about the shooting and went to the school to wait outside for his ninth-grade son.
“My heart dropped,” he said about hearing the news. “One of their close friends around their age got killed a year and a half ago. My heart dropped and it’s still kind of dropping until I see him.”
Police said later that the boy who was wounded and the person who was arrested were both students. One person was still being sought. It was not clear whether that person was believed to be armed.
“This has a been a pretty violent week for us,” police spokesman Sgt. Christian Camarillo said. “We’ve had a lot of gun incidents this weekend. The chief spoke about this at length at the press conference Tuesday and here we are less than 48 hours after the press conference and we’re dealing with it again. There’s a lot of guns on our city streets.”
Camarillo was referring to an announcement by San Jose police Chief Anthony Mata about his intent to launch a cash buyback program specifically for privately made firearms or ghost guns, which typically do not have serial numbers and thus are difficult if not impossible to trace. Police said the weapon recovered after Thursday’s shooting was not a ghost gun.
Source: www.mercurynews.com