A Staten Island high school was placed on lockdown Wednesday following a report of a gun inside a locker room – sparking terror among staffers, students and parents.
One student at Susan E. Wagner High School in the Manor Heights neighborhood overheard another student say, “There’s a gun in the locker room,” prompting the scare around 12:27 p.m.
The school was immediately placed on a “hard lockdown” which continued into the early afternoon as police swept the building floor by floor. No firearm has been found, police said.
“I was just sitting in class and all of sudden we heard the announcement to go in a hard lockdown and that’s what everyone did. We all went against the wall,” said sophomore Destiny Davis, 15, who was in Spanish class at the time. “I was kind of shaken. You don’t know when that type of stuff could happen.”
Davis said papers were placed over the windows while she and other students hid from view.
“The teacher was telling everyone not to say anything, to stay quiet,” she said. “I’m definitely not going to forget this. I’ll be more aware of things and be careful of people and their moods.”
Anxious parents raced to the school to pick up their kids, who called them during the chaos.
“She called me hysterical crying,” said Michelle, who didn’t want to give her last name, about her daughter. “She was in the cafeteria. She didn’t know where to go.”
The worried mom added, “When she called me, it sounded like she wanted to say goodbye. She said, ‘If anything happens, I love you.’ I told her don’t worry everything is going to be fine.”
The students were eventually dismissed for the day.
City Councilman Steven Matteo, whose son attends Wagner, was also at the scene.
“Everyone is safe. There is no viable threat. Every teacher is still in there. They’re in the process of clearing the first floor. The top floors are cleared,” he said.
But at least one parent wasn’t assuaged.
“We should have been alerted. They know how to call you when you’re absent but they don’t give us an alert today?” one parent groused to Matteo. “How do you tell parents it’s under control when we see all this?”
Schools in the New York City area have received at least 40 threats since the deadly Florida school shooting two weeks ago.
Officials said spikes usually occur after a serious attack.
The massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland left 17 people dead after confessed shooter Nikolas Cruz opened fire with an AR-15 rifle.