1 student hurt in latest shooting at a Florida high school
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A gunman who carried a shotgun in a guitar case opened fire Friday in a Florida high school, wounding one student before he was arrested on a day planned for a national classroom walkout to protest gun violence, authorities said.
It happened at Forest High School, which was put on lockdown, the Marion County sheriff’s office reported. A 17-year-old boy was taken to a hospital for treatment of a non-lifethreatening wound to his ankle.
Some students and teachers piled desks and filing cabinets against classroom doors as a makeshift barricade.
The suspect was a former student not currently enrolled. No charges were immediately announced.
The shooting coincided with a nationwide student walkout to protest gun violence on the anniversary of the 1999 massacre at Colorado’s Columbine High School. The Ocala school had planned its version of a walkout, students said.
Chris Oliver told the Ocala Star-Banner that his 16-year-old son, a Forest student, told him the shooting happened near his classroom. The boy told Oliver the shooter stood in a hallway and fired at a closed classroom door. The shooter then dropped the weapon, ran and tried to hide, the boy told his father.
Craig Ham, deputy superintendent of Ocala school operations, said the gunman carried the shotgun in a guitar case into the school by blending in with students. Ham told reporters the shooter fired at the bottom of a locked classroom door, with pellets striking the victim in the ankle.
Jake Mailhiot’s Students leave Forest High after a shooting at the Ocala, Fla., school Friday. The shooter is in custody, and the injured student was taken to a hospital for treatment. Teachers and students pushed desks, chairs and filing cabinets against a door to barricade themselves in during the shooting at Forest High School.
psychology class had just begun Friday morning when school officials announced a “code red” alert over the intercom.
“You could hear in their voice that this wasn’t a drill,” the 16-year-old junior said.
“Our teachers started pushing file cabinets and desks toward the door, and a few friends and I joined in,” Mailhiot said. “We also started tying together some jackets to hang out the window, in case we needed another
way out.”
Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods praised the response by the school resource officer, Deputy Sheriff James Long. Long “did not hesitate. He went right in,” Woods said at a news conference.
The sheriff said the suspect wasn’t injured, wasn’t fired at and was arrested without resistance.
Forest High has an enrollment of more than 2,000 students.
Support for new gun-control laws has risen to levels higher than after the Newtown, Connecticut, school massacre in 2012, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, with a slight majority of Americans saying student protests for greater gun restrictions represent a “lasting movement.”
The poll found clear majority support for three specific and recently debated restrictions: an assault-weapons ban, raising the age restriction on certain guns and “red-flag laws” that let police remove guns from people deemed dangerous.
More broadly, 57 percent of Americans say enacting new laws to try to reduce gun violence should be a priority, an increase from 46 percent who said that in 2015 and 52 percent five months after the 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Support for new gun laws has grown among Democratic-leaning groups as well as swing-voting demographics. But at the same time, people who strongly prioritize new gun laws are no more likely to say they’re certain to vote in this November’s elections than the public overall (58 percent each).
The poll was conducted April 8-11 among a national sample of 1,002 adults reached on cell and landline phones.