Student Shot in Toe at School: Boy, 13, Says He Was Showing Gun to Girl
By Georgia Pabst and Sarah Carr, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Feb. 25–A handgun that a 13-year-old student at McNair Elementary School began showing off when a teacher stepped out of the classroom accidentally went off Friday, grazing the big toe of another student.
The boy brought the gun — a small-caliber derringer — to the school at 4950 N. 24th St. apparently without anyone else’s knowledge, Milwaukee police Inspector Vince Flores said. When the teacher left the seventh-grade classroom about 11:45 a.m., the student pulled out the gun and started fiddling with it.
The gun then went off, striking the left big toe of a 12-year-old girl.
Flores described the injury to the girl as minor. She walked from the school to an ambulance, and her mother accompanied her to a hospital, MPS spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said.
Friday afternoon, the atmosphere around the school was quiet, although a few parents came to retrieve their children early. McNair is a neighborhood school that has children in kindergarten through eighth grade. The school has 320 students, about a third of whom were on a field trip when the shooting happened.
The school went into “lockdown” mode after the shooting, St. Aubin said, as teachers and students were asked to remain inside their classrooms. But after-school activities went on as scheduled. St. Aubin said a letter was to go home Friday night to all of the parents, explaining what had happened.
“It’s a scary incident,” she said.
Towanda Jefferson, whose 12-year-old sister and 4-year-old daughter attend McNair, came to the school early Friday afternoon to make sure both were OK.
“I look at how young these kids are here,” she said. “I guess it can happen anywhere.”
Boy said it was cap gun
After the shooting Friday, the boy led school officials to a locker connected to his desk and withdrew the gun from a drawer, St. Aubin said. The seventh-grader reportedly told school officials, “It’s just a cap gun,” and did not seem to believe the gun was real.
It could not be determined Friday where the boy got the gun.
He also reportedly said, “I’m not going to get in trouble, am I?”
A weapons offense typically calls for an automatic expulsion hearing in the MPS disciplinary code, St. Aubin said. The boy remained in custody Friday night.
Students call it accident
Both students insisted the shooting was an accident, she said.
“The girl indicated very openly that he was just showing her” the gun, St. Aubin said.
Although a number of students have been shot near Milwaukee Public Schools in recent years, this is the first classroom shooting at MPS since 1995, when a student at Washington High School was shot in the arm and leg. That shooter did not attend the school but was let in a student, according to Journal Sentinel files.
In January, a 9-year-old girl, Shauntae Evans, was hit in the neck a bullet as she played on the playground with 100 other children at the Mary McLeod Bethune Academy near N. 35th and W. Cherry streets. The bullet was fired from off the school grounds, according to police.
Pete Pochowski, the director of security for MPS, said the district has had a decline in the number of firearms being found each year in the schools, from a high of about 20 six years ago to five or six in recent years.
“These are rare incidents when we have kids bringing these things to school,” he said.
“We like to count on our parents helping us out. With some more influence from parents, we wouldn’t have these kinds of things happening.”
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Copyright (c) 2006, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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