Photo courtesy of CNN.
Summary: A 14-year-old in Palmdale, California was arrested for shooting another classmate on Friday.
On Friday, a gunman entered Highland High School in Palmdale, California and shot a student. Los Angeles County Sheriff reported on Twitter that the suspect was a teenager and officers have taken away his firearm, according to CNN.
Authorities were called to the school at 7:05 am, and officials said that the male suspect was apprehended at a nearby Vons grocery store after the shooting.
No fatalities were reported, but one person has been injured. Witnesses to the shooting said they saw people running from the building and heard gunshots.
The Orange County Register said that suspect was 14 and his rifle was confiscated by police.
The boy injured was also 14, and police stated that he was taken to the hospital after being shot in the arm.
“That student is going to be OK,” Captain Darren Harris, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, said.
The Los Angeles Times said that the shooting occurred because of a dispute between the two students.
Johnny Lewis Sr., whose 17-year-old son is a student at the school, told the Los Angeles Times that he never thought he would experience a school shooting.
“We didn’t know at that time if our son was in danger, injured or shot or what,” Lewis said. “It’s just ridiculous with all the guns in schools. I never knew it would happen to us here.”
Sergeant Bob Boese told the OC Register that this appears to be an isolated incident and that the suspect was a former student at the school who ran away after shooting one student.
Friday’s incident comes during a time when gun control and school safety has been a national hot topic since the Parkland shooting on February 14. Since that tragedy in Florida, the Los Angeles School District reported that it has dealt with over a hundred shooting threats.
“The Los Angeles Unified School District police department reported at least 160 such threats in the nine days after the Parkland massacre, and a tip from a school resource officer led Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies to arrest a 17-year-old student at El Camino High School in Whittier that month who is accused of threatening to “shoot up” the school after a teacher took away his earphones,” The Los Angeles Time wrote. “The student said he was only joking, but deputies later found two semiautomatic rifles, two handguns and 90 high-capacity magazines at the student’s home. His older brother, a U.S. Army veteran, claimed the firearms belonged to him.”
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