Rio Grande High locked down
BCSO deputies respond after fight and reports of a gun circulated on campus
When a fight broke out between four students at Rio Grande High School and reports of a gun on campus circulated the school Thursday morning, students were ushered into classrooms and the campus was placed on lockdown.
No one was seriously injured, the gun was not fired, and parents got to pick up their kids a few hours later.
“This could have been another tragedy in the Albuquerque metro area,” Bernalillo County Sheriff Manuel Gonzales said in a news briefing Thursday afternoon.
He said BCSO deputies responded to the South Valley school around 9 a.m., after school staff reported the fight. Four students were eventually detained. Court records detailing the incident were not available at the time of publication, but Gonzales said three of the juveniles were transported to the Juvenile Detention Center and will face criminal charges. He said there was one victim but did not say what injuries they had or if they were taken to a hospital.
While a SWAT team was deployed to search the school and parents and family members lined up in the rain on roads outside, children hunkered down in classrooms.
Students were posting pictures from inside their classrooms on social media with captions like “Rio Grande Staff us children are scared pls cancel school tomorrow,” and “we don’t need gun control.”
The gun was recovered by deputies before the lockdown was lifted.
APS Superintendent Raquel Reedy told reporters at the briefing the incident was a “perfect example” of how schools and local law enforcement can work together to protect students and prevent tragedies on campus.
“The parents are happy and they can hug their children at home tonight,” she said.
A video of the briefing was posted to the BCSO Facebook page, and some parents took the opportunity to share their concerns, most pointedly, that APS did not tell them what was going on.
“Parents were not notified,” one woman said, posting three separate comments.
Reedy said that, although messages were sent on Twitter, the school website and directly to parents almost immediately, there were some glitches with the alerts.
“The fact is, we did everything we could,” she said, noting the schools would work to improve this sort of communication in the future.
APS and BCSO touted their success in keeping the incident isolated.
“There is probably not a more valuable asset than the children that attend schools, those are soft targets, we recognize that,” Gonzales said. “I don’t think you could ever overreact to an epidemic that is going on throughout the country.”
He said deputies were on scene within two minutes of getting the call, which he attributes to having a deputy stationed at the school. Reedy echoed that sentiment. It could have been a lot worse, Reedy said. When the incident resolved around 11:45 a.m., parents were allowed to pick up their children.
Their cars lined the road, and they waited in the rain while the kids left the campus.
“There was nothing more heartwarming (than) to see the parents standing in line . ... They were there and they saw their children and they were able to walk away with them,” Reedy said.
School is scheduled to resume normally Friday.