Details slow in campus case
It took two weeks to find out that a boy had been hit by a bullet at Hollenbeck Middle School. Parents say explanations were vague.
Even though police immediately began looking for evidence of a shooting on or near Hollenbeck Middle School in Boyle Heights in late August, it took two weeks for school officials to acknowledge that a bullet had struck a student on campus, raising concerns Wednesday among some parents about the notification process.
A bullet that Los Angeles police say appeared to have been fired from off campus lodged in the jaw of a boy as he stood in the lunch line on Aug. 27. Not until Sept. 10 did Los Angeles Unified School District officials clearly convey to parents that he was wounded on campus and that he’d been hit by a bullet.
The information was released after a police union leader disclosed it first at a public school board meeting earlier in the day. The student, who was not identified, is recovering and back in school. But that has not resolved the matter for some parents, who question the district’s handling of the incident.
“They don’t need to hide the truth,” said Abigail Rodriguez, whose son is in eighth grade at the school. “I don’t know why it took two weeks to say what really happened.”
District officials insist that they acted reasonably and responsibly. They cite many unknowns at the time of the incident. The student, who was bleeding from the neck and jaw area, did not know what had hit him, and neither did anyone else.
Los Angeles police were immediately called to campus.
“We canvassed the area and queried calls for service on that day without any verification of [a] shots-fired incident occurring,” said LAPD Assistant Chief Robert Arcos.
The LAPD took the lead in the investigation with assistance from the L.A. School Police, a separate department under the control of the school district.
School police Chief Steven Zipperman said Wednesday that his department and the district had been operating with limited information. “Since we initially had no confirmed evidence of any shooting on campus or discharge of a firearm on campus, coupled with no confirmation at the time of what may have struck the student, it would have been premature to suggest to families that a shooting on or off campus took place,” Zipperman wrote in a letter to The Times. “We can only report on the facts we have at the time.”
Principal Elsa Bolado did get a message out to parents via phone and email the same day. “There was an incident outside the school that caused a student at Hollenbeck to be injured,” she said. “Be assured that the student is well and all of our students are safe.”
That message could be read as suggesting that the student was injured while off campus — and that’s how some parents said they understood it.
The injured boy first went to the school nurse, who, according to the district, did not identify the injury as a bullet wound. The student’s mother took him to a local hospital, which did find the bullet. Arcos, of the LAPD, said official confirmation of a shooting came “several days” after the incident, when surgeons removed the bullet.
It was not until Sept. 5, Zipperman said, that he “had personally confirmed with LAPD” that the boy had been struck by a small caliber bullet. At that point, with “vetted and confirmed information,” he said, the district began working on what to say to parents, keeping in mind the privacy rights of the boy and that an investigation was still in progress.
That second notification went out to parents at about 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, about two hours after Gil Gamez, head of the school police officers union, publicly disclosed the shooting at a school board meeting as evidence of the need for more school police officers.
In the second notification, Hollenbeck Principal Bolado reported, “We have received further information that the injury appears to be a result of an ‘offcampus’ discharge of a firearm from an unknown location or person, whereby the projectile came to rest within the campus perimeter, striking a student.”
Some parents took issue with this second explanation as still being too vague and arriving later than it should have.
Parent Felipa Martinez said that, based on the school’s first explanation, she had assumed a student was injured off campus. She was unhappy to learn the new details two weeks later.