Police arrest students, seize guns in incidents at Olympic and East Meck high schools
Charlotte NC November 14 2018
Social media posts of Olympic High School students brandishing a gun led to a lockdown Tuesday, with parents jamming streets outside the southwest Charlotte school to take their kids home. Police tracked down the suspects off campus, found a gun and arrested three students.
Also, in a nerve-wracking day for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, an East Mecklenburg High student was charged with bringing a loaded gun to school and an Eastway Middle student was caught with a Taser.
No one was injured and no guns were fired. But the episodes ratcheted up tension in the aftermath of a fatal shooting at Butler High in Matthews just over two weeks earlier. Tuesday’s two incidents brought the total to seven guns found in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools this academic year, which is barely into the second quarter. (Tasers and other weapons, such as knives, are tallied separately.)
“It’s a scary day and age,” Olympic Principal Erik Olejarczyk said in an interview with the Observer, describing “a very long and exhausting day” that ultimately showed him preparation pays off.
Olejarczyk said it began shortly after school started, when a student told a faculty member about social media images perceived as threats.
Police said those images were a photo of one student holding a firearm and a video described in a news release as showing “several subjects and a firearm in a neighborhood near the Olympic High School campus.”
An Olympic parent shared the photo with reporters. It shows a teen wearing a hoodie and brandishing what looks like a handgun. “Y’all ain’t want no smoke,” the photo caption read — wording that students interpreted as a threat. Police confirmed that was one of the posts that led to arrests.
Olejarczyk said faculty were quickly able to identify the students. The school went on lockdown as police searched the school. They did not find those students or any firearms on campus, Olejarczyk said.
Over the next few hours, police said, they tracked down three Olympic students who had been identified from the social media posts. Two 15-year-olds and 16-year-old Victor Manuel Campos Romero were charged with possession of a handgun by a minor. One of the 15-year-olds was also charged with possession of a handgun on educational property.
At a Tuesday news conference, officers with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools police did not describe how and when the gun came onto school property, but they said it was off campus when they confiscated it.
The younger students’ names were not released because they are juveniles.
Across town at East Mecklenburg High, administrators got a tip around noon Tuesday that someone had seen a gun in a student’s backpack, according to CMS police.
Police took that student into custody and found that he had a loaded, stolen gun, officers said. Demondrez Dashay Tucker, a 19-year-old East Meck student, was charged with carrying a concealed weapon, possession of a firearm on school grounds and possession of a stolen firearm.
No one was threatened and the school did not go on lockdown, police said.
At 12:40 p.m. Tuesday, the school resource officer at Eastway Middle was notified that a student had a Taser. A 13-year-old student was searched and found with a “pocket Taser,” police said. The student was charged with possession of a weapon on school grounds.
CMPD Lt. Brad Koch said that the student, who walks to and from school, appears to have carried the weapon for protection.
One of the biggest challenges for school officials is the way rumors and partial information spread before anyone knows what has happened.
The social media images involving a gun quickly circulated among Olympic students, whose fears were exacerbated when someone pulled the fire alarm as students were arriving at school. Students speculated that one or more armed students were on campus planning to shoot.
Marquisa Davis, an Olympic parent who serves on the PTA and on the School Leadership Team of parents and faculty, said she initially dismissed her son’s texts that a shooter was on campus. She knew the school had been practicing what to do in such a scenario and thought it was a drill.
But “when he sent the text that said ‘Love y’all,’ I was like, I’ve got to go,” she said at the school late Tuesday morning. Her son, Shamar Winborne, is a senior football player at Olympic.
Winborne said that, despite students’ fears, they remained calm while locked in their first-period classes, texting loved ones and friends in other classrooms. Shortly after 10 a.m., the school began allowing parents to sign out their students.
“We want you to be reassured that all is well,” Olejarczyk told students over the school intercom system. “We are safe and secure and there is not a threat on this campus at all.”
Olympic remained open until the normal 2:15 dismissal for those whose parents didn’t get them.
“I felt like Olympic did a great job today,” Winborne said as he left school with his mother.
Winborne’s mother agreed, giving credit to “Principal O.”
“He was able to keep that shooter off campus,” Davis said. If it hadn’t been for a quick response to the threat, she said. “this could have been a different picture today.”
Olejarczyk said Tuesday afternoon there was no evidence that the fire alarm was related to the gun incident or that any of the students who were charged had been on campus Tuesday. But as the father of two CMS students, he said he understands the fear.
He said he sees two keys to his school’s ability to defuse Tuesday’s incident: Faculty had built relationships with students, allowing them to get the tip early that something was wrong. And he had assigned staff to make sweeps of hallways, common areas and restrooms three times each period, a practice that helps ensure they know whether anyone is on campus where they don’t belong.
CMS Police Chief Lisa Mangum said Tuesday the district, which has been focused on safety since the February mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., is considering unspecified additional measures. Superintendent Clayton Wilcox has said the same.
In fact, Mangum and Olejarczyk had just reported for a CMS principals’ meeting at which Wilcox had said he planned to outline safety changes before going public with them.
Wilcox has balked at taking security measures, such as metal detectors and bag searches, that would make schools feel like prisons. But on Oct. 29, one Butler High student was fatally shot just before classes began and another was charged with murder. Officials and students say the brief clash outside the school cafeteria on a Monday morning appeared to follow a fight between several students the previous Friday night.
Soon after the shooting at the Matthews school, guns were confiscated at Garinger High in east Charlotte and Hopewell High in Huntersville. Wilcox told the Observer the incidents do not appear to be connected.
But he was rattled enough by the spate of gun incidents, even before students returned from their Veterans Day holiday, to tell the school board he will consider more extreme security measures than he had previously entertained, including metal detectors and bag searches.
“We just can’t seem as a community to get our hearts and minds around keeping guns out of the hands of our kids,” Wilcox told the school board last week.
Charlotte Observer
