News

Student charged in BB gun incident

Students waiting for the late bus on Albemarle Field September 18 were shocked to see an eighth-grade boy pull a BB gun out of his backpack and fire it at the crowd of students. According to police reports, the student hit four boys with the BB gun’s small, plastic pellets when he fired the gun at about 4:15 p.m. near Newton’s Gath Pool. The gun was covered in a shirt, but witnesses told the Boston Globe they observed a black barrel and orange tip.

The 13-year-old student responsible for the incident faces four juvenile counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, according to The Boston Globe. The students who were hit were all 8th grade boys, though it did not appear as if the student with the gun was targeting individuals, according to witnesses. One boy was shot in the arm, another in the back of the neck, another in the calf, and another in the abdomen.

The four boys who were hit each had a visible welt from the BB pellet, and officials offered to call an ambulance for them, but all declined.

Tyrique Hart, an 8th grader on the Emerald Team, was one of the boys hit with the BB pellets, and one of the first students to realize something was going wrong. “He just popped out of nowhere and shot at us,” Hart recalled in an interview with The Daytime. “I shouted ‘Oh, he has a BB gun!’ ”

Hart, who said he was only 4 to 5 feet away from the student with the BB gun, said, “I didn’t see [the gun]. He had it under a shirt, but I heard the click and felt pain on my shoulder.” Hart said he then ran away like the rest of the group of kids waiting for the bus. By the time a school official showed up at the scene, students had already left on the late bus and the student with the BB gun had run away, according to interviews with the Newton Tab.

Later that day, police found the student at his house along with a KWC BB gun and several hundred plastic pellets. Police spoke with the student and his mother, and filed a complaint against him in Waltham’s Juvenile Court, according to the Boston Globe.

Day Middle School officials will not release the name of the student or the details of the legal punishments he faces. In an interview with The Daytime, Day principal Gina Healy said she is not allowed to disclose the school penalties imposed either, but added that in cases like this, school officials can either choose to suspend a student for an extended period of time, or permanently expel him.

The school is required to notify the police of incidents like the recent shooting. Day is also required to suspend the student for at least 5 days, according to Newton’s 2009-’10 Students Rights and Responsibilities Handbook

Healy also said there is an “ongoing investigation” into the student’s motive, and she pledged that school officials will continue to keep the school safe.
“We will continue to do the things that we have always done to maintain a safe school environment,” Healy said in an interview with The Daytime. “We want to maintain safety in the school but also help the student get the help he or she needs.”

Day is “looking for assurances from a psychiatrist that this student is not posing a threat to themselves or others,” Healy continued. “We need to work together to create a sense of security.” She acknowledged that students may feel less safe at school after the incident. “It takes time to rebuild that safe sense,” she said.

Healy e-mailed Day parents on the Monday after the incident, and assured students of their safety in a speech to the school over the loudspeaker the following week. She believes “there is a period of time where there is a loss of sense of security after something extraordinary happens, which is completely normal.”

Day officials want students to know they are safe at school, Healy added. “I do think our school is safe,” she said.

© 2009 The Daytime.