Fatal shooting at Bellaire High raises questions about security
The fatal shooting of a student at Bellaire High School on Tuesday is believed to be unintentional, making it quite different from the 2018 shooting rampage at Santa Fe High School that left eight students and two teachers dead.
But an accidental shooting at a school is still a school shooting and a particularly traumatizing event for students, educators and parents, as the community of Bellaire — and their neighbors across Houston — learned this week.
Hundreds of mourners gathered in Evelyn’s Park Conservancy on Wednesday evening for a candlelight vigil in memory of the victim in this week’s case, 19-year-old Cesar Cortes.
Elliott Newman, a sophomore at Bellaire, came over to pet my dog after the prayers and songs. He thought that might make him feel better, he said. The news of a shooting at his school hadn’t fully hit him until that evening, when he came to the gathering with some friends.
“I mean, I’d imagined it ...” Newman said, trailing off.
His eyes were rimmed with tears as he reflected on what he had learned about Cortes’ life in the aftermath of his senseless and untimely death. Cortes was planning to join the Army, Newman told me, and had already taken his oath of enlistment.
It had been barely 24 hours since Cortes was fatally shot in the school’s JROTC supply room as he was getting ready for drill practice.
The 16-year-old suspect was apprehended hours later, about a mile from the school, along with another classmate, who was released after questioning.
Authorities said that the suspect was refusing to cooperate and that the gun was still missing. But there reportedly had been six students in the JROTC supply room, including Cortes and the suspect, at the time of the incident. The four witnesses had been able to give some picture of what happened: The students were getting ready for drill practice when the suspect,
also a JROTC member, lifted his shirt to show Cortes and another student a gun he had stashed in his waistband. They said he pulled it out to give them a closer look — with heartbreaking results.
He has been charged with manslaughter.
“He did not, based on the evidence, intend to kill his friend — but he did,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said Tuesday. “That’s reckless.”
Adults at all levels of leadership have also been reckless in response to America’s ongoing epidemic of gun violence, particularly at the nation’s schools. Education Week reported last month that eight people were killed and 43 were injured in 25 shooting incidents on school campuses or during schoolsponsored events in 2019. In 2018, the year of the Santa Fe and Parkland, Fla., school shootings, there were 24 such incidents that killed 35 and injured 79.
Brianna Cambric, a senior at Bellaire, said this wasn’t the first time she and her classmates have been alarmed by reports of a gun in their midst. In fact, she said, there were several such incidents at the school this year prior to Tuesday’s shooting.
During her first three years at the high school, Cambric said, she couldn’t recall anyone bringing a gun to campus. She wasn’t sure how to explain the difference. But what concerned her more was the inaction of school officials in the face of this school year’s events. On one of the previous occasions, she recalled, a gun in a student’s backpack went off accidentally during a history class.
“Why does it take a kid to die for y’all to start doing bag checks?” Cambric asked.
That’s a fair question, as is one posed by Tanya Rhoades, a volunteer with the Texas chapter of Moms Demand.
“How long must we wait for lawmakers to stand up for common-sense gun laws to keep our children safe in school?” Rhoades asked in a statement.
Laws wouldn’t have made a difference in this case. Minors, such as the suspect, are prohibited from legally carrying a handgun anywhere, much less to school.
And since Bellaire students are scheduled to move into a new school building in 2021, it’s unlikely that this week’s shooting will lead to the installation of metal detectors at all entrances to the current building or other expensive security upgrades.
But that doesn’t mean lawmakers should respond to the news of this fatal shooting with a shrug or by stonewalling the constituents who have been advocating for change to the state’s gun laws.
Granted, politics might make change difficult: In 2019, the Legislature appropriated $1 million for a public awareness campaign to promote safe gun storage. That elicited objections from gun-rights advocates.
And a related initiative from Gov. Greg Abbott’s office has also run into controversy. The governor’s office issued a $1 million grant to flood the state with free gun locks, but — as the Houston Chronicle reported this week — at least one woman who requested some was rejected after the trade association overseeing the grant flagged her association with gun safety groups.
Still.
The shooting at Bellaire High School was the first fatal school shooting of the year in Texas, but the fact that it’s being described that way should prick at everyone’s conscience.
And students at Bellaire — and elsewhere — aren’t resigned to these events.
“School should be our safe haven. Most of us are there at school longer than we are awake at home,” said Milan Narayan, a sophomore who volunteers with Bellaire’s Students Demand Action group. “It’s basically our second home if it’s not our first.”
The fatal shooting Tuesday was demoralizing, Narayan added, because such incidents are precisely what SDA volunteers work to prevent. But he was confident that student volunteers will channel their grief into their work.
“I think we all understand that we have a certain duty and obligation not only to our peers but to our community as well,” he said.
Cortes’ death at age 19 is tragic in part because it does seem to be unintentional; assuming that’s the case, it was a terrible mistake that would haunt the suspect, as well as his classmates, for the rest of their lives.
It should also haunt the adults whose casual response to school shootings enabled this accident, the ones that preceded it and the ones that will follow unless we see meaningful change.