Active-shooter call in Heights was fake, but fear was real
Every parent’s worst nightmare seemed frighteningly close to reality Tuesday in Houston, where thousands of parents whose children attend elementary, middle and high schools in the Heights heard news of lockdowns and an active shooter in the area.
Helicopters swirled overheard, sirens blared and rumors of dead or injured students spread wildly.
Just imagine being Annette Garza Delgado, at work on a normal Tuesday, across town, some 20 minutes from her 14-year-old daughter’s high school in the Heights, when she got a call that must have sent her heart pounding and her mind racing.
“Mom we just went on lockdown. I’m scared.”
The mom told Chronicle reporter Anna Bauman that she tried to calm her breathing as she drove from Bellaire to the Heights.
“Come get me,” her daughter Amanda had whispered. “Come get me.”
Amanda had told her mother that she was crouched down as officers rushed the building and sirens wailed outside.
What thoughts would race through our own minds as our sweaty palms gripped the wheel, and we stepped on the gas and weaved in and out of lanes, wishing our earthly vehicle would somehow sprout wings and fly?
Did the Houston parents on Tuesday see images of their children’s lives pass before them? Did they see the tear-streaked faces of the grieving parents in Uvalde?
Did they scroll their phones for headlines or fumble for the car dial trying to find news on the radio? Did they call a sister, their mother, a friend? Did they pray?
Did they fume in anger, as we did, that this is the price we force children and parents to pay in America so that Second Amendment absolutists can build their arsenals and perpetuate their lies that the free flow of weapons of war in a civilian society somehow makes us safer.
Meanwhile, we know from amateur footage posted to social media what the kids were experiencing during lockdowns that they soon learned were not drills.
Armed law enforcement officers in bulletproof vests, semiautomatic guns drawn and pointed upward, inched into classrooms to scan for threats and reassure the frightened kids and their teachers that they had come to help.
We know now, from officials’ statements, that the report of an active shooter turned out to be a hoax, and was potentially related to a fight involving students at Heights High earlier in the day.
Other campuses locked down as a precaution.
We know from photos by Chronicle photographers and TV news crews that parents were eventually reunited with their kids, pressing them close as they breathed sighs of relief that must have felt like a thousand dams breaking.
The fear and the vulnerability and the panic they felt was real even if the threat was not.
And we know, as do they, that they were the lucky ones.