Police capture two escaped teen inmates

El Paso student, 11, dies after he was struck leaving campus amid gun violence protest

Two 16-year-old boys are captured in Montgomery County less than 24 hours after they escaped from a juvenile prison near Bastrop.

An 11-year-old boy in El Paso died Friday after getting hit by a pickup while his school held a walkout to protest gun violence.

“Obviously everybody’s in a state of shock,” Xavier De La Torre, superintendent of the Ysleta Independent School District, said at a news conference Friday.

The boy, Jonathan Benko, and 12 to 15 other students from Parkland Middle School in El Paso decided not to participate in the walkout and instead left the campus to visit a park on the other side of Loop 375, a busy highway that surrounds parts of the city, officials said.

Jonathan, a sixth-grader and the last one to try to cross, was struck by a Ford F-150 pickup truck, officer Darrel Petry, a spokesman for the El Paso Police Department, said Saturday. He was transported to the University Medical Center of El Paso, where he died.

None of the other children was injured, Petry said. The driver of the truck, who stayed at the scene, was uninjured. He was not charged, police said.

Another spokesman for the police department, Sgt. Robert Gomez, said at the news conference: “It is illegal to walk on a highway. It’s next to impossible for motorists to move out of the way of pedestrians on the roadway, and that’s why it’s a restricted passage.”

On social media, some blamed the walkout for Jonathan’s death and called for schools to stop endorsing the protests, but De La Torre said the students who left the campus were an “isolated group.”

School walkouts took place throughout the country Friday,

the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting. It marked the third nationally coordinated gun control protest this year — each led by students, some of whom have had to participate in school lockdown drills since kindergarten.

They banded together to call for tougher gun laws, share firsthand stories about the violence that has roiled their communities and honor the 17 students who were shot to death in February at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

Jonathan’s mother, Ashley Benko, is a nurse in the University Medical Center’s emergency department, a spokesman for the hospital said, and his uncle, Michael Benko, works as a respiratory therapist there.

“All of us at UMC are heartbroken by the loss of a child belonging to one of our associates, especially a child as young as Jonathan,” Jacob Cintron, chief executive of the medical center, said in a statement.

The El Paso Times reported over the weekend the UMC Foundation has set up a memorial fund for the boy’s family. The paper also quoted the foundation director as saying that a funeral home agreed to donate its services to the family.

The middle school had placed additional supervision at the back and front of the school, but the group of students left the school grounds on the east side, De La Torre said.

The school’s safety and security “is unparalleled,” he said, but when students choose to leave campus “it becomes more and more difficult to guarantee their safety.”

Jonathan’s death was a tragic accident, he said.

“What we’ve come to understand is that there are students out there that are very vocal, that are going to be our future leaders that are going to insist upon walking out,” De La Torre said. “And what we try to do is help them understand that they can still have a voice and that they can still have a presence and demonstrate their recognition and honor of some of the things that have happened in this country without leaving the premises.”